Kitty Approved Bathroom Lighting

Hooray, our bathroom lighting finally arrived! It took over three weeks for the build time (build-o-order) and a week in transit to get to us, but this weekend we can finally do the lighting installation.

In fact, we will be doing a whole lot of installation in our bathroom this weekend, so I will have lots to share next week. I haven't posted much about our downstairs bathroom renovation lately, mainly because there hasn't been much going on, because we were out of town, and because we were having difficulties getting our supplies. Tile that we were told we could always have by a Friday if we ordered by Tuesday? Yeah, that took until the following Thursday to arrive. Ship-to-store special order through Lowes that was supposed to take a week? Uh, yeah, that stuff never arrived after three weeks, after Lowes supposedly called three different vendors. I ended up going to a contractor supply shop and they let me buy from them, for WAY less than through Lowes.

So next week, expect a lot of bathroom updates. We've figured out our weird tub-gap situation, we've got some walls up, and we finally have all of the supplies we could possibly need (including some fun new tools, like a laser level and a tile cutter) to move forward with the next phases.

And we should also have lighting in place by the end of the weekend too. I can't wait to see how it looks installed, but the kitties are already enjoying the lighting. Err, the packaging the lighting came in!

It was comical, pulling out foot after foot of packing paper--it just kept coming out of the box! But the kitties are really enjoying their ugly pile of trash new toy. Why do I spend money on cat toys from Petco, when I can just spend a couple hundred dollars on new bathroom lighting, wait four weeks for it to arrive, and then unpack it?

Ah, well, the rest of our downstairs looks like a whirlwind, ever since we started our bathroom project, I might as well let the kitties have their fun until I'm ready to pick up my own messes! But I really feel like we've been on a rollercoaster with this bath project, and we're now finally at the top of the highest peak, about to speed down the other side. At least, fingers crossed that it will all be downhill from now!

What are your weekend plans? Hope you all have a great one!

    

Why Can't My Cats Do This?

Make friends with a deer!

I'm so in love with these sweet photos I saw on Reddit of a deer and a cat being friendly, that I had to share. Now my kitties need to step up their game, and make nice with our own backyard deer so I can see them more!

Photos from Imgur via Reddit

So stinking cute! Maybe I need to start rubbing salt licks on my cat's heads, to entice the deer to lick them, LOL.

Happy hump day! 

Funny Cat Photo For Your Friday

I sent this photo to Melinda at Palindrome at Home a couple of months ago, because she inspired me to see if I could "bread" one of my cats. Yes, I know, totally old and stale internet meme at this point!

But I just came across the photo again and it made me laugh, so I thought I'd share it here. Hope it makes you smile too!

(I'm pretty sure he was licking his lips in anticipation of eating the bread off his face!)

Hope you all have a great weekend! Anyone got any fun plans?

Surprise, surprise, we will be working on the house. On the agenda for this weekend is organizing my home office/closet bedroom while my husband works on his own office, looking at bathroom tile ideas, attacking the still completely full of boxes dining room, and maybe removing wallpaper from the downstairs bathroom. Depends on how ambitious and motivated we feel like being. Our to do list is so long at this point that we are just kind of picking what to do next by what we feel like at the moment. But we also need to make time to enjoy our deck though, since we only have about a month left before it gets humid and icky out! Gotta enjoy "first summer" while it lasts!

Happy Friday! And happy Mother's Day to any of you mothers reading (hi Mom!).

How To: Build a Custom Cat Door in a Window (Spring/Summer Edition)

On Monday you got to see a glimpse of last week's project: building a custom cat door in a window. Well, now here's how we did it!

First, I just want to say that this is a highly customized project, so I'm not going to provide you the measurements we used. It is all going to depend on what type of window you have, and you need to measure your own window anyway, to make sure you have as tight of a fit as possible. This is the 3rd of these types of custom window doors we've made (scroll all the way to the bottom of this post to see past iterations) and each one has been different, but all were based on the same principals.

Which are, make it safe for the cats, and make it so nobody can break in through it. Obviously, if someone wants to break in, they're going to do it, and can just break a window. But you don't want to make it easy for them to get in through the cat door in the window (and by the way, we know for a fact that someone tried unsuccessfully to break in through our very first cat door back in California, but they couldn't, so they broke windows instead).

Also, I should note that this is only stage one of our cat door. This design is fine for spring and summer, warmer months, but we are going to beef it up a bit come fall, to help hold in the heat for winter.

{Recap} Half Relaxing, Half Working Weekend

We finally did it. We finally managed to carve out some down time this past weekend, for the first time in months!

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights were spent building a new cat door and ramp for the kitties, so they could finally go outside and explore their new backyard. Which is what part of the wood was for that you saw in my Wednesday night post.

I'm going to do a full post on how we built the cat door, since there's a lot of details on how to both make it safe for the kitties, and how to make it secure so nobody can break in through it. But here's a look at the mostly finished (as in, good enough for the first weekend to let the cats use it) set up.

We finished the cat door late Friday night, and just shut the door to the den overnight, so the cats wouldn't find the door without us around.

Saturday morning we decided to go introduce ourselves to our new neighbors. Gotta get that out of the way early, so it's not awkward to be waving at strangers when you pull into the cul-de-sac! I also made some quick little cards with our names and contact info on it to give out, which worked well to leave a short note on the back for the neighbors that weren't home.

Then, it was time to get down to cat/relaxing business.

And....We're Back!

What? You didn't know I was out of town for the past 12 days? :P

Thank goodness I had enough holiday projects that I could line up some scheduled blog posts, since I never like to announce on here when I'll be out of town. But we had a great trip in central Washington State, spending Christmas with my in-laws.

I hardly took any photos the whole trip. Mainly it was a lot of waking up early due to the time zone difference, working almost every day, staying up late to try to get myself switched over to Pacific time, lather, rinse, repeat. It was only about the last two days of our trip that I finally got used to the time difference, and now I'm back home, and have to switch times all over again. Let me tell you, jet lag is a bitch.

But one of the highlights of our trip, other than seeing family, friends, and playing with our friend's kitten, was on our flight from Dallas to Seattle. I grew up with a view of Mount Rainier, but have never, ever gotten to fly as close as we did on our flight there. Or else I have, but the view has always been obstructed by clouds and rain. It was a magically clear day for once, so I made good use of the opportunity to snap a few photos out the window!

Sigh, so pretty! But that doesn't mean I'd ever want to move back to Washington, since a clear day like we saw out our airplane window only happens a couple of times each month. On our way back through the Seattle airport it was grey and rainy, as is typical.

Now that we're back, we've both had to hit the ground running, even though we're pretty exhausted. Work deadlines and all that. Luckily it's a short week for us both this week and next week. I'm hoping now to have more time to catch up on things in blog-land, and to finish out WEverb11. Maybe over the long weekend I'll get some things done, like clean up all of the messes the kitties left for us when we were gone.

This is what I get for leaving wrapping paper, and boxes with packing material on the floor. They've gotten their revenge for us leaving them alone over Christmas!

(This is just one room, but basically the whole upstairs of our house has little bits of packing material everywhere. Guess the kitties made their version of Christmas snow!)

So I need to clean. And go grocery shopping. And do a million other things this weekend. Or maybe I'll just sleep. 'Cause jet lag is lame.

Did you have a good Christmas? Got any big plans this weekend?

The Best Part About Working From Home

Is a kitty cuddling on my lap while I work!

And yes, that is a throw blanket over my legs. My home office is in our basement, and even though it's like 82 degrees outside, it's always cold in my office.

I'm also trying to get on board with the whole there's-no-need-to-dress-up-everyday thing. I really miss my pencil skirts, blouses and 4 inch heels, but there's just no point when I'm the only one who can see what I'm wearing. So I just ordered some t-shirts, skirts and shorts from Old Navy, to beef up my casual clothes collection. I didn't realize just how few casual items I had in my wardrobe, but I only owned 5 t-shirts and 2 pairs of shorts, definitely not enough for my new working from home needs.

If you worked from home (or do work from home), would you still dress up every day, or would you embrace the opportunity to wear more casual clothes?

P.S. In the above picture you can see a glimpse of my new desk (or desks, since I bought 3!). Tomorrow I'm going to start showing off my home office decorating progress, we'll just have to wait to see how close it ends up being to my inspiration board I made several months back.

Maybe This Will Make Going To The Vet A Little Less Painful

Don’t forget to enter my giveaway for a copy of The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, which ends 11:59PM PST, Sunday, March 20th! I'm loving seeing everyone's recipes, and can't wait to try them!

*****

I haven’t been doing much crafting lately. This makes me sad, because I really do love making things and being creative. I wish I knew someone who lived near me who was getting married soon, just so I could be their crafting slave! :)

But doing my own crafting is difficult when all of my crafting supplies look like this:

Yes, that is a hall closet, with boxes haphazardly stacked almost as tall as I am! Nothing is easy to find, I’ve got boxes in boxes, with bags of ribbon, stacks of mismatched paper….

And my beloved cutting mat is just propped up on the floor, probably warping so it will never lay down flat again. :(

It’s impossible to find anything in this mess. Somewhere in there is my sewing machine too, collecting dust. Organizing some sort of crafting space is on my to do list, but at the moment I haven’t found the time or space, and I’m still wishing I could have a dedicated home office/crafting room.

But when I saw cute kitty-patterned fleece for 50% off in the fabric store (when I should have been looking for colored duct tape for another project), I immediately knew that I had to buy it, and come up with a creative, no sew way to turn it into cat crate liners.

See, my kitties have a vet appointment coming up soon. Which is always a traumatic ordeal. Mainly because my rescue kitty is a loud, scared, vocal, drama queen, and freaks the other cats out. They run whenever I get out their crates, because they know that it always means something they’re not going to like.

{Source}

So I’m hoping that by making these soft padded crate liners, the crates will feel a little more welcoming this time, especially if I leave them open on the floor, with treats inside, for a week before their appointment.

Since I didn't want to dig out my sewing machine, I was instead inspired with how the layers of my baby blanket (which is faded, but still in great condition because I was more of a Teddy baby) are connected, by using short strands of yarn looped through the layers and tied in a knot.

Since fleece doesn't fray, I just followed this same method, by folding the fleece so it would fit in the crates, and using yarn and a thick needle to connect the layers together. I had to put the knotted yarn side down in the crates, or the cats would just eat it, but it works really well, and now when panicked, wiggling cats are moving around in their crate, at least they won’t mess up their padding and have to lie on uncomfortable wrinkles.

(Why yes, wine IS a supply used in this project!)

("Helping")

Have you come up with any creative alternatives to sewing on a machine? And please wish me luck getting the kitties to the vet in one piece next week!

(ETA: I'm not sure why all of these photos are looking a little out of focus? I think something is up with Blogger, and it didn't like me manually resizing the photos in the HTML editor....)

I Think I Need A Lesson In Pet Photography

This past weekend I gave my kitties some of the special catnip that I'd asked for for Christmas, and they were being silly, so of course I broke out my camera.

But seriously, I don't know how all you other bloggers come up with such adorable photos of your pets!

Maybe it's because most of you have dogs, and they are better at being still? Or maybe it's the poor lighting in our TV room, or my old camera. Or could it be the catnip making them not sit still....?

But whatever the reason, I think I snapped at least 50 photos, and most just ended up looking like this:

Ghost cat, or blurry cat.

Of the 50 or so photos, I only got one of each cat that wasn't completely blurry, but of course, no cute backgrounds or anything. Nope, they were sitting at my feet or laying on a chair.

(Topper)

(Hailey)

(Rascal)

So, no real luck with photos, but I do have a short video of Hailey all hopped up on catnip, being crazy. I'd tossed an apron onto the back of a chair after cooking, and I think it smelled like my friend's cat or something (the apron was a gift from her), because Hailey sure wanted to attack it!

Do any of you pet owners have any tips on how to get good photos of your pets? Or are you all like me and take a ton of photos, just hoping a couple will turn out?

You know, I think this really just means that someone needs to get me the new camera I asked for for my birthday!

If I Ever Had to Ferberize A Kid….

….my stupid cat has given me lots of practice!

Not that I have any interest in babies of my own, but if I ever had to use the Ferber Method on one, I bet I’d have no problem. (If you don’t know about the Ferber Method, you can read about it here, but basically it’s how you train your kid to sleep through the night, you just let them cry in their crib until they fall asleep, and you don’t give in and go pick them up.)

Well, my cat likes to put me to the test in a similar fashion. She likes to pop out the front door almost every night when I come home, and sit on the front porch. But when she’s ready to come back inside, does she go around back to the cat door, like the other cats do? Noooo, of course not. She sits at the door and meows for HOURS to be let in!


I used to just let her in if I was walking by the front door an heard her, but the hubs was all “don’t spoil the stupid cat, let her let herself in!” So now we just let her meow until she gives up and comes in herself. Although I’m not sure how quickly she’s getting “ferberized,” I can hear her out on the porch from the kitchen when I’m cooking dinner, meowing forever.

Here's a sampling of what I have to listen to on a nearly daily basis. Not only can you hear my annoying cat outside the door, but you can hear another cat inside, meowing back at her!

Oh well, it’s the ignoring part that’s important, not how long it takes for her to give up, right?

Good For Nothing Cats!

On my way out the door this morning, as I was grabbing yogurt out of our fridge (ok, fine, it was Scooby Doo kids go-gurt!), I heard a rustling noise under the fridge. At first I thought it was just veggies shifting in the bottom drawer, but then I decided it might have been a mouse under the fridge!

We have three freakin’ cats, how the heck do we have a mouse in our house? Their one job is to take care of flies and other pests, in return for love, toys and cuddles, but apparently they’re not pulling their weight around here.


Or else maybe they brought the mouse in themselves. They’ve left dead mice on our front foyer before. And lizards, birds and gophers, as nice little “presents.” I wonder if maybe they only injured a mouse and it escaped?

Either way, I’ll be spending tonight pulling out the fridge and scrubbing our whole kitchen with bleach. Even though in middle school I had pet hamsters and two baby mice (that a friend managed to kill in two separate incidents, within a half hour of each other), wild ones gross me out!

Damn cats. There’s a reason why I’m more of a dog person than a cat person. At least dogs will clean up spilled food on the floor and bring you your slippers. They know how to make themselves useful!