Home Improvements

You've all seen our chickens and their coop. You've seen the puppies and their house. Now it's time we broaden our acquaintance. Come on upstairs into the house proper.


Here's a view of my living room:




If you've ever actually been to my house, you're saying to yourself "You've redecorated! We like the addition of the table saw!" But no, it's just all of our living room (and dining room) furniture piled out on our deck. Here is the actual room itself:




Yup. No floor. We're in the middle of putting in a bamboo floor. We've actually gotten about two and a half feet of the floor in. By "we," I mean that the Pirate has actually done the work of cutting and laying the boards themselves while I have been ripping up the kitchen and repainting the baseboards a charming mango color.


When we first undertook this project, I have to admit that our sole concern was financial. I had gotten my yearly bonus at work and we didn't want to spend all of it on the new floor, so we figured we'd save some money by doing it ourselves. We figured we'd do the living room/dining room and the kitchen. The living room was easy - take out the furniture and pry up the carpet.


The kitchen is an entirely different matter. The builders of this place saw fit to put in all built-in appliances - the dishwasher, stove and refrigerator. And before they installed said appliances, they laid the floor under them. So...if we were really fastidious, the Pirate and I would be hauling our appliances out of their cozy nooks and re-flooring under them. Fortunately, the Pirate and I are a little more practical. We will end up having to move the stove and dishwasher, but the refrigerator is safe.


And this project that we originally thought might take us "a couple of weekends" is going to end up taking something on the order of a month, all told. I have lately been likening the process to childbirth. Once the process has started, you're pretty well committed. It's WAY too late to say "Never mind," and put it all back. As with childbirth, I've set my mind on the fact that at the end of the process, we're going to have something closer to the house of our dreams.

We Were This Close!

After about ten days of having the bait eaten out of the trap but no rat to show for it, the Pirate relocated the trap under the chicken coop. That's right, on top of the six inches of chicken poop where the rats are making their smelly, damp burrows.

Once the long weekend was over and the cool weather returned from wherever it had been vacationing, the Pirate and I rested up from the hectic ferocity of the weekend by sitting out on the cool of the deck after sundown, reclining in our deck chairs and watching a DVD on his laptop. Right at the part where we're about to find out that it wasn't the son who murdered the woman, it was the father and then the son buried her because he was in love with her too, there was a tremendous clatter from the vicinity of the coop.

AHA! So, it was partly the location! We were going for the high-falutin', compost-chewing snobby rats, when we should have been going for the chicken-poop-tunneling, not-afraid-of-tall-men-in-muckboots coop rats! The Pirate paused the dramatic scene to rush to what he hoped would be an even MORE dramatic scene....

...and returned with an empty cage. Apparently, the rat had come in, taken the bait and tripped the trap, but because it wasn't on a stable surface, the trap rolled with the rat in it, and as it rolled, the door of the trap unlatched and the rat escaped.

FOILED AGAIN!

But we've got a plan that involves a 1" bolt, a huge washer, a wingnut and a bit of plywood. We refuse to be beaten by something with a brain the size of a pencil eraser!