from Urban Farmhouse to Urban Farm..

Upon pulling into the carport today--which from now on I will refer to as "the barn" as it sounds a lot cooler, and we are considering painting it red-- we were happy to see the former deck in the form of a pile of debris. Unfortunately the former gate that sealed off the walkway to the deck was also in the pile. This left a 3 foot gap between the side fence and the house which wouldn't be a big deal except for the fact that without the deck, the walkway leads you to a 12 ft drop. Not good. Luckily, Catman and his partner were nice enough to bring over a piece of board and some caution tape to seal it up temporarily.

(former deck)

(lemonade anyone?)

                 
Speaking of the cat situation, we finally saw some of the cats today. One is an older male who looks pretty annoyed that we have taken over his house, and then two younger ones.  The two little ones are all black with glowing green eyes. They're really cute, and I took the liberty of naming them. My first thought was to name them Jafar and Scar because of their cartoon villain eyes. I don't know why that was my first thought, but I suppose that just means Disney is doing its job. Later on, I was pondering the cats once more when I remembered David Sedaris' story of naming the rabbits that frequented his garden. I've decided that as a tribute to him, I shall call the cats Tuile and Mouiller.

So back to the dirty work. After dealing with everything outside we decided to hit the ground running and get the last of the carpet out. Then we encountered another block. I was ripping up the carpet on the staircase when all of the sudden I felt like my arm was on fire. I ran out back into the sunlight and looked down at my arm to find hives. No good. Luckily we had some Zyrtec on hand which took care of the problem (and once again made me totally out of it for two hours), but KCA and I decided it would be wisest if I didn't come into any more contact with carpet, as the stair carpet managed to be more disgusting than anything we had previously encountered. KCA removed the rest of it as I spent my time meticulously removing staples from the floor.

(looking downstairs)

After a few hours of staple removal we were joined by SML and KM. We are lucky to be surrounded by wonderful people who do things like show up with burritos and beer, two things that could be argued as more essential to home renovation than maybe even hammers or pliers. While we were giving KM the grand tour of the place, we discovered yet another surprise... SML heard footsteps outside-- and opened the back door to investigate. There was a posse of raccoons hanging out. SML told them to go on, but of course in true raccoon fashion they did not retreat and decided to stare at us creepily until they all ran for the tree only to jump on it and form a sort of stalkerish raccoon totem pole.

Maybe we spoke too soon when we said we wanted an urban 'farm'-house?