Inspiration / Rumination / Procrastination

It's been a long time since I updated. In early September, we went to Paris and Switzerland for a couple of weeks, and our house progress ground to a screeching halt. (See A Life More Ordinary if you're interested in pictures and commentary.) Our Saturdays have been taken up with Hawkeye football, but a long list of painting jobs and other home improvement tasks are piling up for the moment when we find some inspiration motivation.

Inspiration, we have in spades. We visited a couple of homes in our neighborhood that were part of the Twin Cities Parade of Homes
Remodeler's Showcase. One featured a kitchen/sitting room expansion, and the other re-did a kitchen and added a master suite. Both were lovely examples of hardwood/stainless/granite perfection, and both carried price tags in the high $100,000 range. You could buy a bigger, nicer house for that in much of the country.

I don't know how I'd feel about having one of those expansions done in our little house. Everything was beautiful, but just didn't seem to jive with the feel of the neighborhood or the rest of the houses, which were WW2 era models like ours. I'd love more space, but I don't know how well I could stomach a contractor's pricetag in order to have a little slice of trendy new construction attached to my cute little house. Of course, all these noble ideas might evaporate into a turnkey Summit Avenue mansion were I suddenly to come into money...

Somehow, weekly trips to Home Depot and Abbott's Paint are less painful than contemplating an all-at-once renovation, so that's what we'll keep on doing. This seems to be the week of toilets at our house. Our super-duper low flow upstairs model started running this week, and we ended up replacing all of its guts. It works better than before - truly an accomplishment for two humanities majors.



Broken, rusted out toilet innards.

This morning, I took Phoebe out while Craig was in the shower. I needed to use the bathroom, so I went downstairs. I opened the toilet lid, and saw something in the bowl. Without my glasses, it looked like a leaf, and I bent down to investigate further. Once my head was a foot over the rim, I realized it wasn't a leaf at all, it was a MOUSE. Floating in the toilet bowl. After I got done screaming, I ruminated on how I mortgaged my life away so I could deal with drowned mice at 6:15 in the morning. Being a homeowner is so rewarding. (Not for the faint of heart.) I have no idea how the little guy got in there, but hope that his untimely end is warning enough for his little mouse buddies.

Outside, it's become fall. Fall is beautiful.



But you never realize how many trees you have on your property until fall comes around. And how leaf-covered your yard looks after the neighbor painstakingly removes every shred of leaf from his lawn.



The leaves do, however, cover up things that you had no idea were sitting on your lawn...



Thank goodness for rakes. My desire to get this random suppository box out of our yard was almost as strong as my desire to Not. Touch. It. Some things are better to just not think about. Mice included.

We ripped up the sickly, pale hostas in our front planter and planted daffodils and tulips for next spring. Once the bulbs are done blooming, we'll put some impatiens in.





Craig is apparently too much man for the pitchfork. Well, that lasted a summer. We'll have to invest in a tougher model than the Home Depot standard next spring.

We also set up our birdfeeders for fall and winter. Watching the birds got us through several Phoebe-less winters in Iowa City, and we hope to get a lot of feathered visitors again.



So far, we've had very little but squirrels, who shimmy up the stakes and hang upside down on the feeders. They're entertaining, but some squirrel baffles will be necessary if we don't want Phoebe to explode from pent-up squirrel hunting urges.



Here's our resident albino squirrel - named Morrie II in memory of Morrie the albino squirrel at our last apartment.

As we tuck in for winter and think about painting and working on making our basement a useful space, I'll be turning around yard ideas in my head and calling my mother to get her Master Gardener advice. Some of the problems we hope to address next spring and summer:



Creeping Charlie. Eeek.



The end of the gutter on this side of the house doesn't drain properly, and dumps water over the edge, washing out a corner of the yard and draining dirt down the sidewalk to the carport:





All in all, the yard slopes to the carport. We hope to figure out some way to minimize this - probably with some planting beds built up around the sidewalk.

Before all that, stay tuned for Painting! and Demo! and Snow! But hopefully no more mice.