Speed Bag

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!

Bedroom done!

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 later, when we have the ceilings redone.

Pickles, meanwhile, couldn't understand why I would want to do all this activity in the evenings instead of doing normal couch time with her:

In the end, she went ahead & compensated herself well. I cleared out some dead plants from the garden bed on Saturday afternoon, & she spent Sunday morning in the sun, on the soft, warm soil:

The garden has a ways to go before I can replant after the Mouse-pocalypse -- I have to build a contraption -- but the bedroom is now totally done & checked off the list. I didn't get to work on the mural because I have a school assignment to finish, but I'm still satisfied with the progress this week. Next week: a return to the mural, along with some overdue yard cleanup!

Mouse Onslaught. Again. Still.

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 stops at the bottom of the stairs to power-suction-sniff all the tiny cracks in the mortar at the base of the wall and bark (which sets off the dogs in the house next door -- sorry, neighbors!). She somehow scratched her lip doing this:

(the pink dewdrop shape right under her nose)

That wall is in a slow state of collapse -- plenty of nice little holes for mice to live in. We're supposed to get some very heavy rain this winter, so we've been talking to the neighbors about replacing the wall before that starts. I feel bad for whoever takes the wall down and sets a thousand mice loose.

In other news, I have started the bamboo leaves on the mural, but it's hard to see the progress in the photo. If it's dry this weekend, I'll get some more work done & post a photo then.

I also have felt inspired to finally tackle the last remaining pink trim in the house:

It's in the bedroom, which has the most doors (ugh) and the most big furniture to move (ugh), so I've been putting it off for the past three years. I'm excited to be tackling it, & finally being rid of the hideous color!

Second Annual Labor Day Paint Fest

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 soon" by the guy who inspected the house for us when we bought it, we have just two left (replace the mud sill at the back of the garage, and cap the foundation in the garage). From multiple gas leaks around an old and improperly installed water heater, to the light fixture in the kitchen secretly sparking in its junction box in the ceiling, to the imminent collapse of the whole back quarter of the house (which would have landed on the neighbors downhill), it's not an exaggeration to say that this house was a hazard. It's an appalling comment on the local real estate market that you can spend such an astronomical sum for a house and still have serious problems like this, but it is what it is. At the end of the day, we plan to be here for many decades, so it's satisfying to know we've already gotten through so many items on the Serious Things To-Do List, and that our home is safe and sound for the long haul.

Anyway, it was really warm this weekend, so I decided to keep painting, and get the foundation layer of the bamboo mural up on the walls under AJ's office. Here is the space before:

And here it is after:

(Yes, it's supposed to look mottled like that.) I finished off the ceiling the same light gray as the trim on the rest of the house, as well.

Two days of painting and no one has gotten food poisoning or fleas, unlike last year's Labor Day Paint Fest (click here and here to refresh your memory), so I think we can call this year a success!