Life Is a Project

…that’s always under construction.

So is our house.

Way back when we were get­ting the Cas­tle prepped for occu­pa­tion, we were sur­prised to find our own per­son­al lake in the cor­ner of the mas­ter bed­room’s sit­ting room. The imme­di­ate cause, a bad­ly designed roof, was repaired way back then.

Rip­ping off the walls (inside and out­side) and replac­ing what­ev­er had been dam­aged in the attic, walls, floor­ing, and crawl space were sched­uled to hap­pen short­ly after the roof repair.

Mononu­cle­o­sis changed that plan, and the job wait­ed six months ’til this weekend.

shad­owkatt, offi­cial paparaz­zo of the Cas­tle, has doc­u­ment­ed some of the project. I’ll let her share the visu­al record when­ev­er she’s ready.

red­crow­stu­dio’s son J and shad­owkatt’s friend C have been here all week­end help­ing curiousmay9 and rid­inrab­bit. I was unsurpised to learn that it did­n’t get fin­ished as planned yes­ter­day, so they were all back at work today.

Yes­ter­day, J removed a rac­coon skele­ton from the crawl space, dis­turb­ing a nasty colony of bugs. The pest con­trol guy was just here a week or so back! He nev­er claimed that he was going into the crawl space, though. The work crew applied more bug poi­son lib­er­al­ly into the crawl space, the new walls, and the attic.

This morn­ing, J was putting new shin­gles on the out­er wall while C learned to mud sheetrock. I think shad­owkatt was up on the roof. They’ve pro­gressed to paint­ing some­thing (I’m not sure what) out­side. I know this because shad­owkatt’s nose is cov­ered in paint.

After every­thing is all done, sam­bear and I will final­ly be able to tru­ly fin­ish the inte­ri­or paint­ing. After that, we’ll rip up the old car­pet and replace it (with car­pet now, hard­woods at some point in the future). While I’m sure the car­pet won’t be done, I do hope we get the paint­ing done before the par­ty next weekend.

The orig­i­nal plan also includ­ed replac­ing some duct­work upstairs and down­stairs. That was nixed, due to the dis­cov­ery that some utter idiot com­min­gled the upstairs and down­stairs HVAC sys­tems. It isn’t sup­posed to work that way, and it does­n’t work very well. Sort­ing out what should go where and what must be replaced/rewired/reducted/whatever is going to be a much big­ger job. Mess­ing with it might have result­ed in it not work­ing at all, rather than not work­ing so well.

Installing a new attic hatch (with the nifty pull-down lad­der) will hap­pen anoth­er day. The gut­ter at that cor­ner of the house has been repaired, so water should con­tin­ue to go away from, rather than into, the house.

Build­ing the loft bed for shad­owkatt has also been bumped, as get­ting the walls closed up was a high­er priority.

Kar­li is roam­ing hap­pi­ly in and out of the house at will. She thor­ough­ly approves of more, more, more peo­ple! She just gets upset when they leave.

The cats are not so hap­py. They’ve spent most of the week­end in curiousmay9’s bed­room. They have all the neces­si­ties in there (except staff), but they don’t like it.

Yes­ter­day’s cool weath­er was mar­velous. It’s warmer today, but I’m hop­ing to get fall tem­per­a­tures again soon. I like hav­ing the house open, as it’s been all week­end, when it’s cool. Our bod­ies will be hap­pi­er when it’s closed up again, to reduce the aller­gen load.