Fumbling towards fall

Well, we FINALLY seem to have gotten some decent summer weather here on the Wet Coast. Of course, it's September, but who's counting? I'm going to go ahead and use that as an excuse as to why I haven't posted in six months (or however long it's been - I'm too hot and lazy to go check).

Actually, now that I think on it a little, that's exactly why I haven't posted in so long. Not the good weather, I mean, just that I am hot and lazy.

Mostly lazy.

Anyway, just because I haven't posted doesn't mean we haven't been busy. We just haven't done a LOT of work on the house - aside from gardening, lawn mowing, cleaning up cat puke... you know, the usual. I still haven't set up my office beyond getting my desk in and my computer working (read above re: hot and lazy), but the War Department's office is looking really good - one more thing to put up that will be the subject of its own post, I'm sure - and the garage is a little more organized than it was. We even found time to clamber up the side of Mt. Doug with a friend from Toronto one particularly fine afternoon:

We also made these, which was fun:

Tasty, too.

Anyway, nobody comes here to read about our cooking (and if you do, you're probably going to be disappointed when you ask me to post recipes and then I never get around to it because, well, hot and lazy, remember?) so let's get to the meat of the post, shall we? The end of summer means that we are running out of time to do something about the horrendous state of our sunroom and get it all buttoned up before the rain comes back. (In case you forgot about the sunroom, check it out here.) Fortunately, Mike - the guy who installed our floors - has recovered from a recent bout of cancer (wish I was kidding, but hey - he's doing really well now) and was looking for some minor projects to get back into the swing of things.

As an aside, can I just say how utterly tickled I was to hear that he thought rebuilding our sunroom - something that would take us an absolute minimum of six months to do ourselves - was a minor project? No? Well, never mind, then.

Our part of the deal was that we would be doing the demo work ourselves, along with the eventual refinishing of the inside, including drywall (Joy!), paint, trim, and tiling the floor. With the windows coming in supposedly this week, it was time we got back to work and started taking out the crap.

This crap:

Yes, we've been using the sunroom as something of a storage room / project staging area. It just seems to be the place where all the stuff winds up that doesn't REALLY belong inside, but probably shouldn't get rained on. Before we could find places to store all that stuff, I had to finish ANOTHER project I was working on that was taking up most of the garage:

And before I could even START that project, I had to finish this other one.

Maybe it might be easier to just tackle these in order, eh? Matter of fact, there's probably just too much for one post, so maybe I'll just pick one topic for this one, and do up another post for the next one? Who knows, maybe it might even force me to post more often, right? Is this too many question marks for one paragraph?

Okay, forget the sunroom, forget the other project, let's back up the train and start over. Man, this being lazy thing just leads to a whole lot more extra work, doesn't it? Makes me wish I'd listened to what my mother told me all those years ago. ("What was that?" "I don't know - I wasn't listening.")

Right, so, I mentioned a while back (I think I did - I went looking for the post and wound up editing six others and forgetting what I was looking for so you'll just have to find it yourself) that we had these windows in the upstairs hall that let in all this light in the morning. Given the angle of the windows and the positioning of our bedroom, the light streams right into our bedroom door. In the winter, it's not so bad, but at certain times of the year, that light starts streaming in right around six in the morning which is too damn early - especially if it's the weekend and you're trying to sleep in. Not that we EVER sleep in. much.

Now NORMAL people could just close their bedroom door at night, but NORMAL people don't have whiny-ass cats that howl if they're deprived of our company for more than five minutes while we're at home. Of course, we could also come up with a system of curtains to block off those windows, but they're impossible to get to, and I have no idea how to rig up a system that would allow us to open and close the curtains (without use of a remote control, which would be AWESOME) once we did install them.

Anyway, our solution to this was, I believe, not only ingenious, but a pretty clear example of what sets us apart from NORMAL people.

Here are the windows in question, coincidentally enough, at about 7:30am one fine Saturday morning.

And here is not only a perfect example of the light cutting right across our bedroom door, but also the solution.

Yes, we installed a cat door in our bedroom door. We liked the solution so much, we put one in the War Department's office, too.

Anyway, it's taken me so long to get around to finishing this post that the September weather has turned cloudy and grey, and I'm not nearly so hot anymore. Still pretty damn lazy, though, so that's all for now. Tune in later this week for the saga of the bookcase!