Random Thoughts in My Head

I don’t do a lot of girlie stuff to pamper myself: I never get manicures anymore, I rarely get pedicures (maybe once a year) and the same goes for haircuts. I do love a hot soak in my tub though and I think I might try detox bath this for starting out my week: http://www.wikihow.com/Take-a-Detox-Bath

Especially considering the schedule of teaching I have for myself for the next nice months I think I might really need this!

My new nickname, according to Michael. Granted my takeoff is slow and it takes quite a bit of fuel (coffee) to get momentum going, but once I start, look out, there is not much that can stop me!

This is the story of what I can only say is true love for an animal. We might still turn him into slippers as winter draws closer, but for now our cat Shadow is safe from harm.

Direct link to photos here

We discovered in the recent months that for some reason Shadow had been urinating on the carpeted floor upstairs near the bathroom. I tried a plethora of store bought things to clean and remove the scent, we tried placing tin foil on the floor to hinder him wanting to go near it (we read that cats don’t like walking on tin foil on the floor and while seems that it was true, but he managed to not walk on the foil and still pee on it).

I read that a mixture of 1/2 vinegar and water could be applied, let to soak for five minutes and then toweled up. That seemed to work once, and again twice, but the third time I did it I think I left the vinegar for more than five minutes. I toweled it up hoping for the best, but after time we started to notice a faint odor again so we decided we were going to rip out that section of carpet and padding and replace it sooner rather than later. Eventually we plan to put all hardwood upstairs so this is a temporary fix, even so we didn’t want to deal with that smell and stained area all winter.

So on Friday when it was too rainy to go hiking we decided to fix this. We started to pull the carpet back and realized what we were smelling was only the beginning. Not only was the padding sticky and gross, but the floor had become saturated and smelled pretty stinky. This suddenly became a much bigger project than we had anticipated.

So we cut out the gross floor. We let it dry overnight. Had to baby-gate the area to keep the cats off of it, which meant we were rather trapped in the bedroom/bathroom area during that time too (do not try to climb over doubled baby-gates while half asleep, this is your only warning). Sent Michael to store for supplies (note, this is trip one of three in a 24-hour period). Painted the area with Kilz paint. Double painted it. Stopped for the night. showered all the disgusting off and treated ourselves to homemade sundaes with our new ship cream dispenser.

On Saturday we went to the Home Depot since some of the materials Michael bought had been mislabeled and were not the correct depth. Returned a bunch of stuff. Lowes did not have any 3/8 underlayment, so we went to Home Depot. Found a small piece of 11/32 that was just big enough and decided since it was a temporary fix we could shim the difference since we figure we are ripping out all underlayment when we redo the floors in the next year or so. Also got self-adhesive tiles to cover the floor instead of trying to deal with scraps of carpet that might just be destroyed again if any lingering smell was detected by the evil Shadow cat.

Now that we had the correct supplies, we decided to work on the floor some more. WE only put another layer of paint down though.

Sunday we prepped and painted the first coat on the kitchen wall. See previous blog entry for those fun times and the third trip to the home improvement store in about 24 hours.

Sunday night after a hard day of painting we decided to work on the floor some more. I was determined to finish it, thinking we only had an hour or so left. We had to make our small piece of wood fint into the section of floor we had cut out. Why we didn’t use perpendicular lines and exact 90 degreee angle shall remain a mystery to me, but in the end, we did it with both our wood and our cardbord shim to go under the wood. That turned into nearly three hours, but we finished. Quality wise I am pleased with the results.

I’m going to spare you all the gory details here and just let you see the end product:

Not indicated in this photo is that I touched up the paint at the bottom of the yellow wall today as well. When we redo the entire floor and put molding up, you will never notice the difference since it is the same yellow.

Direct link to photos here

Our staycation was interrupted by a few “around the house projects”. We cleaned the gutters, painted one more wall a brilliant yellow and the big project ended up being the removal of carpet from the hallway upstairs.

The gutters were a dangerous but relatively quick job. You can see why we needed to clean them here:

As for painting, this was the fun part of our interrupted staycation and was done in between the much more difficult task of removing a small piece of carpet from our upstairs hallway so I am starting with this first. The last wall left to paint bright yellow runs from our dining area to the stairs by the kitchen (this looks like there is a corner on the wall, but is just because there are two photos from different angles):

As you can see by the bright yellow contrast on the upper right corner, the old light yellow was a bland, boring, pale comparison to what it would become.

Even though we had been to Hope Depot twice already within the last 24 hours, we had neglected to check our paint supply and ended up going to there for a third time to get more paint. Our errand gave us the excuse to stop at the studio and pick up another ladder which turned out to be very helpful:

Of course Shadow wants to help:

The hard part about this area was the steps. We have this folding ladder that can turn into all sort of shapes: regular ladder, scaffolding, or even scarey place to stand while painting:

Scary double ladders:

End result after one coat of paint:

We also spent a lot of time repairing the floor in the hallway upstairs. I’ll save that for the next entry.