And So It Begins

Pictured below is our nemesis. This is the thing that will occupy our weekend. There will be no camping for us. There will be work and pain and misery. And we will revel in it because that is our lot in life. One of the difficult parts of any project we undertake is the cat problem. We have had painted cat paws decorate our floors. We have had cat paws in wet grout. We have cat hair floating about at all times...that's a given. But Susan devised this clever barricade that we believe will work for us. That of course remains to be seen as the night goes on.
Susan has started us out on our first day pretty strong. She completed the first leg of our journey and got from the top to the middle landing.

Below is a picture from this morning and from after Susan finished for the day. She did all this today while I was working my second job at the bar. Now it is my turn to accomplish something while she works one of her second jobs...or is it her third.

The before and after is nice and this overhead of the middle landing shows the progress she made.....and how far we have to go.

Now let me take a moment to talk about what a tunnel visioned bonehead I can be. I was thinking I was going to have to put a ladder up to the balcony so I could get to my clothes and then we would sleep on an air mattress in the living room while we allow the stained stairs to dry.

Susan looked at me with the incredulous eyes of a mother watching her stupidest child. "Ya know," she started. "We do have a back stairway!"

Oh yeah!

We never use it and plan to build it out of existence but in the meantime, this is a pretty good argument for keeping it. The problem is that we have rendered it useless due to the transition of the screened porch off the bedroom into a closet. There is very limited head room in the back stairway right now.

But it is good news that we can still sleep comfortably at night.

I will show off my handy work with the things I accomplished in tomorrow's entry.

In the meantime, I totally forgot to mention the cool thing I found on line. There is a website that will take your blog and turn it into a book. I have wanted a hard copy of this for a long time. Every once in a while I will start printing off a bunch of entries. But I came upon this cool feature and turned the first four years of this blog into one volume.

I surprised Susan with it on Mother's Day and she thought it was pretty cool.

Hereafter I will make a new volume each year and the intention is to leave it with the house so future owners (providing I don't blow this place to smithereens) will have a pretty good record of what we did during our tenure with this house.

By the way, I was looking through it last night and discovered we started the stairs in May of 2007. So we are three years into this particular renovation.