Roof!

Walls!

We have walls!  It's starting to look like a real house!

  

Foundation!

The amazing disappearing house!

The house remodel/addition is finally underway!  I'm planning to post photos periodically so you guys can see the progress.  Here are some before photos (the last one was taken after the trees were removed):

And here’s what the place looked like yesterday (3 weeks after signing the contracts):

The grading should be done soon and then we'll get a foundation!

Floor Plan

I’ve been meaning to start posting on my blog again, but I haven’t had anything interesting to say for a while.  Once we start the remodel I can post photos of the progress, but for now you’ll have to settle for looking at the floor plan. 

It seems like every time we talk to the architect he thinks that we’ll apply for permits in two weeks (it’s just like in The Money Pit!), so hopefully I'll have some updates soon!

R.I.P.

Gus Linnehan AKA “Little Mouse”

Born: December 23, 2010 in Brickway A Lower Level, Mark Young’s bottom desk drawer

Died: December 18, 2012 at his home in Sebastopol, CA

Gus was the sole survivor of his litter and lived a long (for a mouse) and pampered life with my parents until his recent illness.  His interests included running on his wheel, exploring their house under controlled conditions, and rearranging shredded toilet paper.  He maintained a lifelong (and carefully monitored) friendship with his three cat housemates.

My building at work has been having mouse problems since early November, with at least a dozen sightings and soiled desks. One guy that didn't even have food in his desk found a nest made out of his papers with babies in it and put them outside, even though he knew they were too young to survive. Most people (including me) didn't know they could get into the closed metal file cabinets at our desks and found out the hard way. When I got back from Thanksgiving, I found droppings and chewed up items in all 3 drawers, and a mouse in the top one, but it took off as soon as I opened the drawer. There were other sightings after that, but I figured that by the time the week-long holiday shut down rolled around Facilities had gotten a handle on things.

On Monday morning when we got back one of the guys found that the energy bars in his desk had been nibbled on, everything had been soiled, and some of his papers had been told to bits and pulled through a small hole in the back of the bottom drawer of his cabinet. Between the back of the drawer and the back of the cabinet he found a nest with 5 baby mice. They were about 11 days old, they didn't have their eyes open yet, but they did have fur. I didn't want them to get put outside like the last ones and Facilities was planning to give them to the exterminator, anyway, so I took them. The web said that the survival rates would be low, but I figured it was better than a guaranteed death with the exterminator. I made a quick run to Walmart for kitten milk replacement formula (ironically, that's what the web recommends feeding baby mice) and started feeding them every 1.5 hours, including at night. I brought them home that evening, and Mom started taking care of them while I was at work. On Wednesday night four of them died within an hour or so of each other, but the fifth one opened his eyes that night and is getting bigger and stronger every day. My plan was to release any that survived into the wild once they were weaned, but I read that the hand-raised ones wouldn't know what to eat and would have lost their fear of things coming from overhead (and that fear helps protect them from predators). So now I intend to keep him (his lifespan is only expected to be about a year), and move him to building right behind our place, where our washer and dryer are. There's a small storage room with a window and if he's in there in a cage he should be safe from the cat. I think he's a boy, but I don't know for sure. I haven't come up with a name for him yet, I just call him Little Mouse.