HFM

No mural this week after all. We got the front & back yards tidied, AJ fixed her bike, & I got the present AJ gave me for my birthday set up: Of course I had to try it out for a while, using these great mitts she also gave me: Both the mitts and the speed bag are vintage, to go with the overall aesthetic of the garage/workshop/DuserHaus. Of course, at this point, vintage can refer to things that are much younger than we are, but they do look great down there with all the 60+ year old stuff from the "rooms" under the kitchen. After all that, I was pooped. So, no mural. Next week, I'm going out of town for work, so maybe no mural then, either. But it's next on my list!

It took a few evenings & one whole day, but the bedroom is now done! The pink trim has been eradicated: I did two of the walls in the same blue-gray as my work room, and two the same ivory color of the new rooms: When the construction guys jacked up the back of the house to repair it, they caused a shift in the bedroom wall that loosened & tore some old wallpaper that people have been painting over for decades:  When we saw that, we immediately peeled some of the paper back, to make sure the wall wasn't cracked. It wasn't, but we exposed a couple large bare patches of old plaster that we've just been living with all this time. As a quick cosmetic fix, I tried to cut away as much paper as I could to get to the places where it was still stuck to the wall, while not making the holes too much larger, and then painted over the holes. It worked pretty well: It doesn't catch the eye when you're in the room, so all's well that ends well. We can do a real fix lat...

The mice laugh in the face of my attempts to block them from getting into the house. Ultimately, what it will take to stop them from coming in entirely is taking the vinyl siding off of the house, and plugging up every tiny gap along the foundation -- a project that is at least a few years away. New kitchen cabinets/counters would help but that's not happening immediately either. For now, we will just have to keep doing what we're doing: keep the kitchen spotless to not give them a reason to hang around, and keep the kitchen door closed at night to keep them from exploring the rest of the house. I suspect the reason it's so much worse this year than in years past is because they seem to be taking up residence in the concrete block wall on the north side of the yard. Judging from Pickles' behavior, they've been nesting in the back part of the wall for a few months. Over the past week or so, they seem to have moved closer to the houses. When Pickles goes out, she stop...

No one got on the roof this weekend. AJ got her annual back-to-school cold, and it seemed like the shingles needing replacing were in a tricky spot, so we decided to skip it entirely & call a professional. I also didn't continue on with the black paper strips on the shoji wall. I got sidetracked by the discovery of the mouse highway on-ramp in the garage: They have been burrowing up through the insulation behind this new sheetrock in the garage, straight into AJ's office and the kitchen. I had to move a bunch of stuff to get in there to block that off, so I took the opportunity to paint that sheetrock, as well as the new firewall in the garage: As beautiful as the construction project has turned out, at its core, it was about bringing a number of things up to modern building code standards, including adding a firewall between the garage & living space. It's not glamorous, but I'm really happy that out of about a dozen things we were told to get done "very s...