Adventures in Homeownership

It's been an interesting (and busy) couple of weeks, as far as our house is concerned. As I mentioned in my Ketchup Post, we scheduled our new cork floor installation for the week of August 20, and we have a number of preparation steps to complete before that happens.

I've actually FINALLY painted (two coats) three of our new six-panel doors that we installed forever ago. I must say, they're looking nice. Too bad I still have eight more (upstairs) to go. *whimper*

In the middle of all of this...

...THIS happened. That is a gigantic branch down on our deck, in case you couldn't tell. In fact, it's actually two gigantic branches. The photo above was taken after Michael ran out into the pouring rain to pull our table and chairs out from underneath it (we were worried that the weight could end up cracking the tiles on top of the table).

The top one had come down first, and when the lower one was bearing the extra weight, it buckled, too. Awesome.

For some perspective on how big this mamma-jamma is, here's Nora's little house sitting beneath it. Anyway, the most troublesome thing was that the branches didn't come COMPLETELY down (which, of course, is a really good thing in many cases). We have a chainsaw now, but still couldn't easily get up that high. Thankfully, our neighbor came over with a pole saw and was a huge help. Even so, it took a week to get the backyard cleared and the limbs down completely.

Last week, it looked like this:

Again, I say... awesome. But Michael chipped away at it throughout the week and then he and our next door neighbor took care of the rest yesterday.

Our backyard is looking a bit different these days. Poor old tree.

The good news is that we now have some extra (and free) fire wood for the winter. The bad news is that all of the time spent on tackling the tree severely cut into the prep time for the floor installation. Which means we need to catch up. Michael started a small patch on Friday night, and I set out to tackle some of it last night. (Michael would've helped, but he had some work (work work) to do last night, and I figured I'd do what I could.)

Well, we've put in a total of about three hours at this point, and here's where we're at:

That's only 25 sq. ft. of floor cleared, mind you. And we have a total of 340 sq. ft.

Those of you who follow me on Instagram have already seen this photo and my plea, but it's worth repeating for all of you: If you're ever thinking about gluing some kind of flooring to your subfloor, DON'T.DO.IT. Because I, and any future owners of your house BEG YOU not to. The subfloor is so jacked up from the removal that we're going to need to put new subfloor down anyway (over top of this old stuff, apparently), but that doesn't save us from having to chip away at this parquet piece by freaking piece.

We have a floor scraper (basically a flat shovel) that we've been using to pop up tiles, too, and it's helpful--when it works. But some (most?) of the tiles are glued down so tightly that there is no getting under them without a mallet and chisel. And it is HARD WORK. By the end of two hours, my back was killing me, my shirt was soaked with sweat, and I had multiple blisters forming on my right hand (despite wearing work gloves). In fact, I *still* don't have feeling in my fingertips.

You can imagine how excited I am to get back to it tonight.

Our flooring guy originally quoted us $750 for demo/removal of the old floor. If I knew that it was going to be only $750, I would--after testing this out on my own--GLADLY pay that money. However, after seeing what this is like, I know there is no way in hell we could get away with paying only $750. In fact, now that we know that we need a new subfloor, that adds costs to the job already. We're hoping that by ripping it out ourselves, we can at least cancel out that added expense. Ugh.

So, pardon me if I'm quiet in the blog world these next couple of weeks.

Has anyone ripped out a glued-down floor from a wooden subfloor with success? Any trees down in your yards from the summer's storms?

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Dag Nabbit

When we moved into our house last August, it wasn't long before we noticed that we had a little furry friend that liked to frequent our "park-like" (as described by the seller's agent) backyard. It wasn't Tessa, of course; it was a cute little fuzzy bunny.

We spotted him (her? who knows) every once in a while, hopping along through our grass, near our bushes, under our trees. We saw him less during the winter months, but as the weather grew warmer again, the sightings increased. Then, within the last few days, it started to seem like this bunny was everywhere.


You know that saying, "multiply like rabbits"? Yeah, well... you know what's coming next, don't you?

There are multiple bunnies.

They look a lot like this guy (Credit: Wikipedia)

I woke up to a beautiful morning today, bright and sunny. I stumbled into the bathroom to get myself into the shower, and I took a few moments to look out over our backyard and admire how well the greenery has all filled in now. Immediately, I spotted our furry friend. And then a second bunny came out of nowhere and started chasing him. I continued getting ready to shower, then took another peek. Now, I saw one bunny hanging in the middle of the yard, and noticed some activity toward the back of the yard--TWO bunnies running around. 1 + 2 = THREE BUNNIES.

I quickly walked downstairs to alert Michael to the bunny baby boom, then went back upstairs to get my butt in the shower. It was getting late now.

But then I took one more look out the window and OH MY GOD THERE WERE FOUR BUNNIES.

We have a bunny infestation, y'all.

I like them as much as I can like a wild furry creature. I mean, out of all types of infestations to have, I'm happy to have bunnies, of all things. But, uh... what do we do?

A few weeks back, we were talking to our next door neighbor and somehow got on the subject of the wild little rabbit we had seen many times before. He actually said to us, "You guys have to be careful about your deck. A few years back, the previous owners had a problem with a bunch of bunnies living under there." At the time, we were all, "Oh, really?" and kind of brushed it off.

Apparently, bunnies find our deck (and our yard) to be quite a cozy home.

Michael did some research this morning and it seems that there isn't really an easy way to get rid of them. Some solutions involve moth balls, or predator urine. Which begs the question: where the hell do you buy predator urine? Plus, Tessa would have a BALL rolling around in that. Yum.

We're leaning toward trying out my mom's tender heart trap and then driving the bunny wayyyyy down the road to the country and setting him/her free. And then repeating that step into infinity until we somehow capture them all.

Gahhh. Let the adventure begin.

Has anyone ever had their yard overtaken by rabbits? How did you handle it? Any advice?

(Also, did you know that "dag nabbit" derives from "dang rabbit" from the old Bugs Bunny cartoons? You learn something new every day.)

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