Celebrate

We will soon have a finished guest room and we will celebrate.

Here's a sneak peek.

We are almost finished. We have touched up the windows and walls with paint. Bill installed the quarter-round yesterday. He also filled the nail holes. That means our punch list has dwindled to:

• sanding and touching up the quarter-round
• hanging the curtains
• moving furniture back in

The closet door is not finished, but neither are any of the other closet doors. Bill re-did the doors to the rooms. The closet doors will be stripped and refinished when the weather gets warmer (but not too warm) because the closet in this room leads to the attic. Atticus would be very happy to go up there and kill mice. 

But I don't want to think about that.

I would rather focus on the guest room and celebrate that it's almost finished!

Who will be our first guest to stay in the room? 

We won't accept reservations until the above punch-list has been checked off. At which point I'll post pictures and officially open the room for reservations.

Don't celebrate until then.

behind the screen

I've mentioned a few times that Atticus is a great hunter. He gets mice, birds, the occasional rat… and they all stay outside.

We hope that if there was ever a mouse inside the house that he would also catch it. I don't want to think about that.

I prefer they stay on the other side of the screen doors.

This morning I cleaned up a few things and found a few things that needed to go up to the attic. We have been keeping the door closed to the room that has the attic access because that is the guest room currently under construction. I went into the room and headed up to the attic.

There are a few things sitting on the stairs to the attic, one of them being the vacuum cleaner that we just used on Saturday.

Mere inches from the vacuum was the body of a dead mouse.

I happened to spot it as I was halfway up the stairs.

I typically check for bugs.

Not mice.

There was a mouse.

I got to the top of the stairs and did my I-just-found-something-bad-and-don't-want-to-walk-by-it dance. It involves shrieking, moving feet around in an odd sort of tip-toe dance, and flailing of the arms.

Peeking back over the edge of the stairs, I made sure it hadn't moved and was actually dead. Then, risking life and limb I ran back down the attic stairs, jumped into the bedroom, slammed the door shut and sprinted out into the hallway closing the bedroom door behind me.

Someday I will have to take a picture of the attic stairs so you can understand just how risky that was.

When Bill got home, after a different risk involving ice buckets (I'll post that video later), he took care of the mouse.

I hope that if a mouse ever ventures inside these walls again, Atticus finds it and takes care of it.

I'm still a little shaky from the escapade.

 I'm very thankful for Bill.

the light is on in the attic

I went through two boxes that have been in our attic, and in my life, for too long.

I was keeping things like the wall calendar from my senior year of high school.

Sure there are lots of memories that go with it, but it doesn't mean anything to anyone else. Why am I keeping it?

I had a pile for trash, a pile for recycling, a pile for donation and a pile to keep. Oh, and a pile of this-belongs-somewhere-else. Like all the photos I found. Those belong in my photo box.

For the things that meant something to me, I took a picture of it before disposing of it. That means I have more to blog about!

I have many more boxes to go through. Most of those hold knick-knacks. I don't know what I'm going to do with those... leaving them in boxes in the attic doesn't seem like a good idea.

going for a grand

I'm doing it. I'm going for 1,000 posts. This is number 699 (excluding drafts).Which means I will have to continue posting at least for part of another year. 


Why? You ask.


I don't know. I like goals. They give me something to aim for (isn't that the point?) and they keep me busy. Why not?


I have tons to keep talking about. 


For instance; I'm going to start going through all my "stuff". Instead of holding onto these treasures that mean only something to me, I'm going to take a picture and then blog about it. If it's worth anything, I'm willing to sell it. If it's not, it's going to be given away.


Can you tell recently I've read that Bible verse about "treasures in heaven"? You can't take it with you, so why hold onto it? 


Besides isn't my "junk" someone else's treasure?


I'm sure most of what I have will end up recycled. It's not worth to be anyone's treasure.


Let's be honest, what good is it doing taking up space in the attic?


See? It's another goal. 


You have that to look forward to. 


Here's a picture of a treasure that I never brought home.

Skylar and I painted pottery two years ago. I painted this, it was a coaster. I was super excited about it. It took a long time. I knew after it was fired it would glow like a stained glass window.


Alas, sometimes things in the kiln don't fire properly. This was one of those times. Inexplicably, the paint didn't stick and flaked off in paint chips (don't eat them, they may contain lead, click here for that story). The paint-your-own-pottery story gave me credit for a new piece but what they couldn't give me back was time. All the time I had spent in each individual mosaic. And then getting the black paint between the raised edges... 


What I painted instead was a food bowl for Atticus. I was going to post pictures, but don't have them on the laptop. Really? Are you surprised? It's my sad story and I'm sticking to it. I'll get pictures of the bowl up next week. I've been waiting. I'll explain why when I post the pictures.


Mystery. Intrigue. I've got it all... in my head.

The Cat in the Attic

The other night, while I was getting ready for bed, I heard some noises. They sounded like they were coming from the attic. My first thought was, "what sort of small critter is up there?". My second thought was, "where are the cats?".

Their curiosity is always peaked whenever Bill or I go up there. We call it Narnia, which I've blogged about before, here.

So there I am, wondering what could possibly be up there; even though I called out to Bill he had not moved from our bedroom. "Damsel in distress? I'll just keep reading my car magazine."

Before we were overrun with skunks, squirrels or worse, raccoons I took matters into my own hands and bravely looked around the bedroom corner toward the attic door. It was ajar. And there in the middle of the room, looking as guilty as a cat possibly can, stood Juliette. That meant Atticus was most definitely in the attic.

At that point I yelled out to Bill again, making it sound more urgent (because it was but I was not going up there; I did turn the light on for him). He finally came to my rescue and saved us all from certain danger, or what turned out to be just the cat in the attic.