Yet another reason

Way back in the early 1980s, Rick and I lived in Italian Village which is in Columbus, OH. Much like German Village and Victorian Village, this area was targeted for urban renewal and had some amazing houses in it, mostly in really bad shape.

We rented a cute house, which you can sort of see if you Google the address: 790 Kerr, Columbus OH. Go to the street view; it's the little yellow house almost entirely blocked by a tree. A guy at church had rehabbed it, and mostly I loved living there. What I didn’t like were the roaches. Because the houses on either side of us were still uninhabited, the roaches zeroed in on our house. They came in droves or flocks or whatever you call lots of roaches.

It was bad enough when they were in the kitchen. I’d flip on the light and they’d go scuttling. Or I’d open a drawer and they would swarm out of view. I kept asking Rick to have our landlord get an exterminator but for whatever reason, it never happened. I’m sure since I was a stay at home mother at the time, I was a LOT more aware of the situation than Rick was!

The last straw came when I found a roach crawling on the rail of Ben’s crib—on the second floor. I told Rick the boys and I were going to visit my folks (nine hours away in Cape Girardeau MO) and that the roaches needed to be dealt with before we came back.

That did the trick, and an exterminator came in and bombed the house. Rick said the clean up was horrific, he said it was like raking dead leaves.

This morning I noticed Eddie and Chloe staring at something where the kitchen linoleum and the wood floor meet up. It was a roach, about as long as my thumb.

I need to find a count down clock to add to this blog—17 days and counting.

Odds and ends

First, here's a final picture from Friday's rain. Please note this was a very small part of what actually ended up in the glass. Pretty gross, eh?


Next, here's a blurry picture of Wally, who's found the top of Kent's dresser. You may wonder why he's so exhausted when it's still early in the day. Well he's pooped because he's been shredding toilet paper again. I have mixed feelings about this latest shenanigans because on the one hand, that's an activity he did in Kansas City. So I wonder if he's feeling less stressed. On the other hand, he destroys perfectly good toilet paper. . .

This is why I hate our rental apartment

The window leaks. And it's not just a tiny dribble either. It's been pouring rain since early this morning and isn't supposed to clear up until probably tomorrow. I've already mopped up puddles more than once and with most of our belongings still in storage, I don't have enough towels to soak all this up. And honestly I don't want to use our towels, the water coming in is filthy, probably from the bricks of the building.

So I propped that glass against the window to catch some of the drips. Yes, just some. It got about half full before I emptied it to start over.

August 15 cannot get here soon enough.

Wake up kitties

This is why Wally was horrible last night; he slept all day so he could be obnoxious all night. For that he got a one way trip to the pet carrier about 10:30 PM.

Laundry, quarters and cats

Doing laundry here at 127 Saint Botolph Street reminds me of when I lived on Central Street in Kansas City. I worked for a small company that didn’t offer direct deposit but actually handed us paychecks. Every pay day I’d cash my check and get a roll of quarters for laundry.

We do much the same thing here except that with direct deposit, getting quarters takes a little more effort. We hoard our quarters, and when needed, Kent runs across the street to the Laundromat to get change from their change machines. With the large capacity washer and dryer, we can usually get by with two loads of laundry a week. By the way, if you haven’t done laundry in pay machines recently, costs have gone up a bit. To wash one load costs $1.50, and drying also costs $1.50. So each complete load takes 12 quarters.

Kent warned me that when he did laundry, the clothes didn’t get entirely dry even on the hottest setting. So far I hadn’t experienced that, but yesterday I pushed the load limit and ended up with some damp items.

We use a washable duvet cover on the bed which works well here while most of our belongings are still in storage. Chloe has always loved one specific spot on the bed. She creates a kitty-sized divot in the featherbeds and leaves behind massive amounts of cat fur. In Kansas City I would vacuum the bedspread, but since the washer and dryer here are quite large, I decided to wash the cover when I washed our sheets and a light blanket. I also needed to wash a load of light/white clothes. Altogether I estimated I had two loads of laundry, with the sheets and the duvet cover going in one, and everything else going in the other.

However, the duvet cover came unsnapped in the dryer and swallowed the sheets. So that load was not entirely dry. I separated the sheets from the duvet cover and gave them about five more minutes which was enough for them. But I didn’t have enough quarters to continue drying the duvet cover, plus the blanket and light/white clothes that were already washed and waiting their turn. I brought the duvet cover up to the apartment and draped it over Kent’s office chair by the window AC unit. Wally decided that was the perfect hiding spot for a small yellow kitty.

Solving the litter box issue

Having lived in decently sized houses the last six or so years, I’ve gotten used to having space to put litter boxes in discrete spots. In our Overland Park home, we put Chloe’s litter box in the second floor laundry room. In our Hyde Park home, we put all three litter boxes in the basement—the door to the basement had a pet door already installed, which made the basement the perfect location.

We knew when we moved to Boston that we would need to consolidate down to two litter boxes even though cat wisdom says you should have a litter box for each cat. Well, I don’t think that’s possible in Boston, not if you want to have furniture in your apartment too! So we have just two boxes now, and it’s working out OK. Given the weird floor plan of this rental apartment, the only place we could find for the remaining litter boxes was the kitchen pantry. I’m sure you are sitting there thinking EW, and I agree. It’s not ideal—I have a sensitive nose so the smell gets to me plus at least one of the cats is a big litter flinger. Even with litter mats designed to get the litter off their little paws, you’d better wear shoes in this apartment, or else you'll have “sand” sticking to the bottoms of your feet . . .

I’ve been looking around for functional and decorative solutions to the litter box issue. I want to have them hidden but still easy to get to for scooping, and I want them to be somewhat contained. Originally we’d hoped that the front hallway of 3 Claremont Park would be large enough to support a bench—and we would put the litter boxes under the bench and then make a skirt for the bench. But the hall isn’t wide enough, and I think the traffic flow would really be compromised.

Yesterday while scouting online, I found this solution. It’s sturdy enough to be a bench and pretty enough to go in the living room. But did you see the price?? Those run $499 each, plus shipping. Now I love my kitties, otherwise I wouldn’t have named my blog after them. But I don’t love them enough to pay over $1,000 to cover their poop boxes.

So I think I will take one of the extra Ikea tables we have from when Kent was here alone and needed some furniture, and make it into a faux bench/litter box concealer to put somewhere in the living room. You can see it here as a normal table, with Eddie in the foreground. The lower shelf comes off and is the same dimensions as the front side of the table. I’ll find some cool fabric and make a cushion and then a skirt to go around the whole thing. And I guarantee it won’t cost me $1,000 either.

Inspection is done!

And while we do have a few items we will look to have fixed, the unit is in pretty good shape. Kent and I took a lot of pictures, and I've loaded them into the slide show. If you'd rather be able to see bigger images plus their captions, go here.