Painting and Pussycats

Whoooooeeeee, it's been a long time.

To sum up:
Brian got laid off in July. We were homeless in September. We closed on a house in October and moved in just as soon as we could. It needed a LOT of work. We're still wading through it. Brian laid a hardwood floor while I wrote my portfolio for National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

The rest of the house we're working on room-by-room after the initial painting binge and laying carpet in the bedrooms in October and November. Everything is lingering in the 85%-done range, but we're knocking things off little by little.

This week was spring break. We did a lot of work on the house. And adopted a pussycat from a local shelter.

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We have a front sitting room, divided from our back living room by a galley kitchen and dining area. We do most of our living in the back, which needs a significant amount of work, so we decided to focus on getting the sitting room finished first.

First, let's cast our minds back to the way the house used to look...........







Glance back up there and REALLY take in the dingy yellow walls, the hideous awning windows, the nasty old 60s linoleum tile.

The first part of the transformation was the windows. We ordered them just before New Year's, and they were installed in February.

The guys were supposed to be here between 8 & 9.






No guys.





STILL no guys. And no phone call.

So I called the office, and they let me know that the guys were running late. Nice of them to fill me in.

FINALLY they showed up, at almost 11:00.

There's windows on that thar truck!





Didn't take them very long to get to work tearing a big hole in the house. They started in the back living room, and did one set of windows at a time. Then they worked their way around to the front sitting room.



























Then we decided we were going to paint. We picked out a nice neutral tan color that looked dirty and cold once we got it on the walls. 25 paint samples later, we decided that the public areas of the house would be green, and we'd repaint the office to be not-green.

This past weekend, we did a LOT of painting. Then we committed a lot of hangings.

I give you the after:















We love it so much, and it's given us so much hope! This place WILL feel like a home, eventually.

I've painted the first coat of paint on the entry way and down the hallway, and part of the kitchen. This evening and tomorrow around school work I'll put on the second coat and get going on the trim on that. Next up is the dining room and whatever parts of the kitchen I can reach without an epic ladder.

We have a lot of hideous wallpaper to strip in the living room yet. Then we can patch and paint and hang the curtains back there, too.

We can't wait to get it done.

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Here's the still nameless kittyface.

The first hour or so he was hanging with us in the bedroom, being all social. Then we tried to introduce a dog to him and he retreated to the closet. The TOP SHELF of the closet. When it appeared that he wasn't coming down any time soon, I stuck his basket up there so at least he had something to snuggle down in.















Yesterday, though, he decided to make our bed his fortress of solitude and hung out there for a significant part of the day.









This morning he was pretty comfortable with the bedroom door open and the doggies sniffing him through the gate, so I brought the dogs in one at a time to get better acquainted with him. After a while, we had some serious inter-species diplomacy going on.

First, Quinn made some peace with him:












"I haz a kitty!"


Then, Pulu decided she could be calm and not-spazzoid enough to come visit, too.














Here he is, lounging after I kicked the mutts back out of the bedroom.





After the Great Peace Summit, I took Mr. Pants to the vet for a check-up. He is 7 lbs of healthy kitty, give or take one ear full of ear mites. Poor itchy boy.

While we were at the vet, he discovered that if he headbutted the seam in his cardboard carrier hard enough, he could squeeze himself out through the resulting openings. Didn't take him long to reproduce the trick. I was planning to go get him a proper kitty carrier after the vet's appointment, but I ended up bumming one from the vet for the trip over to the pet store and back. Heh.

After we got back from the vet today, I locked the dogs in the bedroom via the doggy gate and gave himself the tour of the rest of the house. He's been exploring and settled in to hang out on top of my grandmother's table next to my grandpa's Ugly Lamp (tm).

Now everybody's loose in the house together and co-existing pretty peacefully. Catbutt even got up to chasing down a big ol' buzzy-fly that was hanging out in the house this afternoon.







He really, really, REALLY needs a name. Nothing quite seems to suit him yet, but he's just now starting to explore the house and show us his true personality.