The Insanity That is Our World

This is from an e-mail I sent out to some friends the other week, so some of you may have already read it. It describes our cat situation and why we constantly talk about de-catting, which has become a LARGE part of our lives. This is about the first weekend in our new house.

Lesson 1: NEVER underestimate the size of the truck you'll need.
It all started on Friday when we began moving what we thought wasn't that much stuff from Gaithersburg to Frederick. After about 2 hours of packing the truck, it quickly became obvious that we were either going to have to do some extremely creative packing or we were going to have to make two trips. Somehow through the God-given talents of engineering that my brother has, he was able to figure out a way to get it all in the truck. We piled the rest of the stuff in Kevin's SUV, Terry's Outback (my brother) and Bill's Toyota (our friend who helped). Yes, we had a caravan.

Lesson 2: Think When you Wheeze
We unloaded fairly uneventfully (thank goodness) took everyone who helped out to dinner and went home for our first night in our new home. Kevin decided to go running the next morning at 6:30 am with his friend Bill who helped us move (yeah - way too much energy.) Well, this just about killed him and me. Getting 5 hours of sleep didn't do much for us after moving a ton of stuff.

We took the day and went to the movies, a leisurely lunch and tried to enjoy ourselves. When we came home, we took a nap to recover and the wheezing began shortly after. As Kevin was sitting at the bistro table and chairs (currently residing in our kitchen) he asked me to come over and look at the window screen - cat hair. Uh-oh.

Kevin's allergic to cats, VERY allergic. Could this be the cause of his wheezing?

Lesson 3: Wheezing = Cats
After tossing and turning, reading and pacing, Kevin decided to go to work as he couldn't breathe. Did I mention that it was midnight on a Saturday? So off he headed to Gaithersburg where he worked from 12-4 am and then slept on the floor of our old apartment.

Sunday was pretty insane. We knew we had a problem, we just needed to decide what to do about it. I found the card for the daughter of the former owner to confirm that it was cats. Yes, Sadie had 3 cats in and out over the years. Kevin had done his research the night before on the Internet and the only way to go was to rip out all of the carpet and wash down the walls.

Out went the emergency call to my parents and brother. They came to the rescue after church. In 6 hours, we managed to rip out all of the carpet, tacking strips and staples plus wipe down the walls in the upstairs. The only carpet left was in the Living Room, which was covered in, yes, BOXES.

We slept in Gaithersburg on an air mattress Sunday night in the middle of our almost empty apartment. Kevin had a 10 hour roundtrip ride to upstate NY for work the next day, so he had to get up at 4 am.

Lesson 4: The Next Time We Buy a House, Buy a New One!
That pretty much sums up our crazy first weekend in "The House". Can I just say, "I'm tired..."

Score One for Us

By some miracle the house didn't spit out more cat hair balls, a toilet didn't fall through the ceiling and the ants seem to have vanished...for now. Last night, we actually made progress without a minor disaster befalling us.

Kevin started painting the ceiling over the bottom set of stairs to the basement and I was able to tape all of the hallway and down the stairs in preparation for painting the trim. Hooray! (I forgot to take a photo, sorry.)

Kevin was also able to finally finish scraping the mildew off of the back of the bathroom tiles. And the BIG accomplishment: My brother came over and took almost all of the remaining carpet and hauled it away to the dump. The last of the carpet padding and a few random pieces of carpet were shoved into garbage bags and are ready to go out to the curb for regular trash pick-up. Hopefully by next week, we'll be completely devoid of cat carpet!

Oozing Tiles

We should have known our Home Inspector was way too cheery. He walked around our house telling us that everything was an easy fix. When he came to the master bathroom shower stall with it's brown, mildewy tiles he said, "A little Tilex should clear that right up."

We now know that that isn't the case. When Kevin went to clean the shower he sprayed Tilex and started to wash down the tiles and a brown ooze began to seep out from behind. Kevin wisely stopped.

When my Dad came down and took a look, he started tugging on the tiles and they popped off of the wall. The grout had failed and the cement board behind the tiles was rotted. It would have been nice to know this before we bought the house! Our master bathroom is now a serious construction site.

My Dad assigned Kevin the task of taking a utility knife and scraping the mildew off of the back of the tiles, so that we can reuse them. (Apparently, it's very difficult to match tiles...) If you're imagining this to be a completely disgusting, grimey job, you're right. I'm just glad he didn't ask me to do it. Our half of an hour of television every night is filled with [scrape, scrape, scrape] followed by "Kevin that hit me in the face!" Fortunately for Kevin he wears goggles to work on the tiles, unfortunately for me, sitting 4 feet away isn't far enough.

When Ants Attack

After surviving the ant attack on Saturday when we discovered more of the dirty, little fellows scurrying across our kitchen floor Kevin sprayed the outside of the house. Kevin proudly told me on Sunday how he had sprayed the ground the whole way up their trail and under the siding.

Hindsight is always 20/20. Apparently, he trapped the ants and the the only place they now had to go was up...and into our kitchen. Last night as I was talking to Kevin's sister on the phone and discussing our ant problem I walked over to the kitchen window to discover ants trailing out from under the window frame across the wall and into the spice cabinet. They were crawling all over our cereal and tea. Gagging was definitely an option at this point.

Kevin ran off and started brandishing his can of Raid upon his return (his weapon of choice). He killed all of the ants and probably ruined any chance of using this cabinet for food in the near future.

We had bought "Terro" recommended by a co-worker of mine, but it's time to call in the big guns. I'm off to call the exterminator.