Look, A Funny Pic of a Cat in a Box

Look, its a funny picture of our retarded cat sitting in a comically small box.

Laugh dammit!

Going out and coming in!

For those of you who don't know, we retained the services of a guy who holds estate auctions (known here as Auction Guy) to dispose of the stuff that dad left behind in the house. In order to make things easier for him, we moved everything into the living room. The following two pictures show (almost) everything that we wanted to get rid of -- please bear in mind that there was more furniture, books, and about twenty years worth of collectible tins downstairs that we also needed to dispose of.




This is what the living room looked like after Auction Guy took away most of our stuff -- I really like Auction Guy (Note: In the interest of fair reportting, he didn't take everything, I moved a good amount of stuff into our attic, but he took most of it!).





Once Auction Guy had come and gone, it was time to call in the Carpet People (I call them that in honor of a book written by Terry Pratchett, an obscure reference that probably only Stephanie and my father will get). This is what the downstairs looked like before they came in.



I estimate that this carpet has to have been at least 40 years old. Photos can't really do it justice. In order to get the full experience, sweep all the dust in your house into a big pile. Shove your face into the pile and inhale deeply -- that's what the carpet was like.



So anyway, the Carpet People came and tore up the carpet, revealing the REALLY scary tiles underneath.



You may have noticed that there is a pillar in the center of the room. The carpet bulged strangely around the pillar, we didn't know why. Once the carpet was out of the way, we saw that the pillar looked like it had been shoved upwards about an inch above the rest of the floor. Since I now own this house, I try not to think about little details like this.



So, here's the downstairs with the new carpet. Yay new carpet!!!





We also got them to take up the carpetting in the bedroom and the living room/dining room area, revealing the virtually untouched oak floor underneath. Here's what the living room looks like:





Here's a photograph that Stephanie took of the bedroom, I saved it for last, because I really think this picture looks amazing. It doesn't quite look this good in real life, but its close.

The Passion of the Suction Cup

This is one of the things we discovered in the house that I put in the "Huhh???" category. Apparently one of the suction cup clip thingees (anyone know what these are called?) didn't stick well enough to my father's computer desk. My father's solution: nail that b*stard in place. Let's see it fall off now! If this seems sad to you, just remember that this suction cup thingee died so that others could be redeemed.

Progress At The House!

OK, here are some new pictures of some of the work we've been doing on the house.

Let's start with the basement:

This picture shows part of the nasty wood panelling in the basement that we used as a test case, to see if we liked the color scheme we picked out. We choose a color in the off-white/cream/tan range for the walls, called "Vanilla Wafer." I was overwhelmed at the names they give to colors in decorating stores. Stephanie and I were actually having a serious discussion trying to decide between "Vanilla Wafer" "Turban Shell" and, I think the third was called something like "Muddy Pavement." If I was forced to describe these colors I would describe them as tan, tan and tan, yet my wife (the art student) was torn. "Which of these do you think looks better," she would ask me. The sad part was, I answered her. We had long discussions over which shade of tan we were going to use, even though the answer was foregone conclusion. If one of the paints you have to choose from is called "Vanilla Wafer" and you choose anything else, then there is something wrong with you. The color of carpetting we have chosen is called "Stormy Blue" and is a greyish blue. There aren't as many choices in the colors of carpetting, but they have just as silly names. Our ceiling, incidentally, is colored "Ceiling White." To me, this is the perfect name for a paint, there is no ambiguity whatsoever about what color to use. I'd market an entire line of paints like this -- aimed, I imagine, primarily at bachelors. There'd be "Ceiling White", "Living Room Beige" "Hallway Blue." It would be beautiful.



OK, this is a picture of the panelling at the start of the priming process. Our friend Tracy is seen there helping Stephanie with the painting. Since we were painting over the panelling, we had to get a special primer made out of shellac. The first thing we had to do was paint over all the annoying little grooves in the panelling -- hence those ever so attractive white lines running up and down the walls.



After we'd filled in all the lines, we could start rollering the walls. I need to explain something about the shellac-based primer. It had a very distinctive odor. Its a hard odor to describe, but "bad" really does the job well. If you want to what it was like slopping this stuff onto the wall with a roller, go huff a bag filled with de-natured alcohol and industrial varnish. Our friend Faye was also lending an assist with the painting. She, Stephanie and I could only paint for about five minutes or so before our eyes began watering and we started to choke. Tracy, however, couldn't smell it. This is a lot like being unable to smell a slaughterhouse. She was happy to just keep rollering away on the wall for us -- a little too happy, actually. This photograph was taken right before we forcibly took the roller away from her and made her go stand in the fresh air for a while.



This is the bedroom, after it had been primed. In looking over all the photos I'd taken, I have absolutely NO idea why I took this photograph. Stephanie thinks that it might be to show all bottles of soda and water that were consumed. We had to have the windows open for a lot of the painting, and it was like an oven up there.



Here's another picture of the nasty wall that had wall-paper on it, now all nicely primed.



These are the primed windowsills in the bedroom. It took us about two days of solid work to strip off most of the old nasty paint on them and prime them, but they look great now (Note: We are probably going to go for the quick and dirty approach to the windows in the rest of the house, because that was just too much effort)



This is Stephanie late at night working on the windowsills.



This is Stephanie the next morning, still working on the windows. You can't see it, but she is wearing a belt which I fitted snugly around her waist, which would deliver a powerful electrical shock if she attempted to leave the bedroom before the windows were done. When I came back that morning and saw what a great job she'd done, I even let her eat something. She's a great gal, and one day real soon I'm gonna take that belt off of her.



Here is the wall of horror in the computer room. All the paint has been removed from the wall, leaving nothing but a scary pink paper underneath. We had NO clue what that stuff was, and we were a little afraid to remove it (after all, it HAD to be there for a reason), so we just patched some of the torn spots with plaster, and sanded it down so we could prime it.



Here is another view of the wall. Of particular interest, please note the HUGE pile of paint chips which were scraped off. We are reasonably sure its not lead based paint -- at least it didn't taste like lead.

I didn't want to own a cat

Tony likes boxes. He likes to sit inside boxes. The box pictured below is very small. A small book was sent to me in it. Its so small that we couldn't even use it to pack stuff in, so we left it on the floor. Tony saw the box. Tony is a very large cat. Oblivious to the physical impossibilities of the situation, Tony decided that he NEEDED to lie down inside this box. We're not entirely sure how (or why), but Tony managed to curl himself up inside the box. It is now his favoritest sleeping spot in the whole world. We have put down other boxes next to this one, larger boxes, boxes with crinkly paper and other things which he enjoys inside of them, but he will have none of it. He will not be cheated out of his tiny uncomfortable box.

This is a picture of Tony in the process of insetting himself into the box.

Removing the wallpaper from the Computer Room

Once I finished removing the wallpaper from the bedroom (read the earlier posting), I went to work on the room which was going to be my Computer Room.

You can't see it very well in this picture, but one wall in the computer room was covered in a biege patterned wallpaper. My parents put this wall-paper up in the mid-eighties, and it was stuck to the wall just as firmly as the day they put it up, it had not begun to peel anywhere (first warning sign)



I treated the wall with toxic chemicals (as was my wont) and then started to strip the wallpaper. Not only did the wallpaper come up off the wall, but it also took most of the the paint with it, leaving a pink papery substance underneath. At this point, my mantra had become "Stephanie is REALLY going to kill me!"



As you can see, it looks no better from the other side. We haven't been able to figure out what purpose the pink paper serves, but we have been able to strip off all the paint, and we're just going to prime over it.

In talking to my father, he told me that they used a special kind of self-adhesive wall-paper on that wall that you just had to dip in water to apply. In removing it from the wall, some of the spots where the paint didn't get torn away were still sticky from the paper, so whatever adhesive they put on that paper, it was really good. Note to prospective wall-paperers: You may want to reconsider using self-adhesive paper in your home remodelling projects, unles you NEVER intend to remove it.

Removing the wallpaper from the Bedroom

Flushed with a youthful enthusiasm, I took a day off of work to start stripping the wallpaper in two rooms of the house. I had been ensured by people whom I trust that this would be an easy job. I started in the bedroom. One wall of the bedroom had been papered in a blue pattern which I found rather pretty. It was pretty decrepit, though, and so I treated the wall with the chemical I had been told would take off the wallpaper just like that.

This is what happened...



OK, it only SORTA took the wallpaper off the wall. After a minor panic attack (my mantra that morning was "Stephanie's gonna kill me"), I went back and treated the wall a second time.



Ta-da! The remaining paper came off, clean as a whistle.



Now, all that was left to do was to clean off the remaining wallpaper paste, fix any holes, prime the wall, and repaint it.

The first step we took in making the house liveable was to go through all the rooms, closets, and drawers and get together everything which we intended to get rid of and put it in the basement.

This is some of what we found...




This is some more of it...



Here's still more of it...



Our next step was to seperate the stuff into the stuff we could throw out, and the stuff we wanted to get rid of at a Yard Sale. As we sorted it out, we moved it all upstairs. This is the downstairs after we cleaned it out...



OK, we didn't move everything. Over to the right are all the books and collectible tins that we are going to sell.

Front of the house

Here are some pictures of the outside of the new house on Ridgefield Road. As you can see it is located on an ENORMOUS hill, which makes getting in and out of the driveway a whole lot of fun (especially in bad weather). My parents owned this house before we purchased it, and my grandparents owned it before them. They purchased it new as part of the development in the 50s. Early on in home-ownership, my grandfather realized that it was far too difficult to move the front lawn since it was on such a steep hill, and so, he planted ivy -- way to go grand-dad!

As I look at these pictures, I notice that we have a chimney on the roof -- I've never realized that before. We don't actually have a fireplace, so I guess the chimney is an exhaust for the furnace. I wish we had a fireplace.