Steve and Judy's Travels!

Posing.

The living room is mostly done.  We get the weekend off.  Monday morning though, they’re going to tear out the kitchen counter and cabinets so they can repair the floor underneath.  No more morning coffee on this side of the street!

The rats and mice in our neighborhood stand falsely accused.  Upon further inspection, and some demolition, it has become clear that it was not the little varmints that chewed through our water line and caused all that damage, it was the big varmint.  The possum did it!  Who knew possums would eat water lines, and other kinds of plastic as well?  He got up through the sub-floor from under the house and tried to eat through the bottom of our garden tub, which we took out because we’re not using it and would rather have the floor space in the back bathroom.

The crew is making good progress on the floor.  Vinyl planking.  Snap together.

The front office.

We’ve gone with a lighter color; keep it bright inside.  It feels a little more modern.

In the meantime, we’re staying as much as we need to in a little park model known as the “casita” right around the corner from us.

We try to stay out of the house during the day to keep out of everybody’s way as much as possible.  So far, we can still sleep in the house if we want, and make coffee in the morning.  On Monday they’re going to take out another counter and disable the kitchen sink though, so we might be here in the casita a lot more after that.

Got the closeup shots!

It’s a mess because we’re emptying out the cupboards and packing up anything that’s loose.  We’re doing that to get out of the way of the workers who are going to fix everything up for us.  They’re fixing everything up because the bottom of the cabinets and the floor in front of the sink are saturated, because there was a water leak, because there was a hole in the PEX flexible plumbing, because a mouse or rat chewed on it while we were gone, because the skirting around the base of the house wasn’t perfectly sealed and the varmint got in.  Don’t know why he chewed the plumbing.  We’ve had mice before and none of them ever chewed through the plumbing.  I guess that’s his personal superpower.

While we had the skirting around the house open to let the water dry out another possum got in, so Donald the pest control guy came out and set a trap.  Here is the possum playing possum.

…but I digress.

That’s a big section of floor that has to be repaired and replaced so we’re just doing all the floor in the whole house and it will all match.  We can’t just pull out one section of cabinet and replace it with a dry one, like the insurance company is limiting its coverage to, so we’ll upgrade the cabinets while we’re at it.  We needed to anyway.  The cabinets are trailer furniture; pressed wood with a paper layer to look like wood.  The paper was peeling.  (We’ve been here fifteen years already.)