Just another day of country living..

Ever since we set out to fix up this house, our friends and family have been warning us that there will be moments when we cross over to the dark side. For me, walking into the house one day and seeing this growing over one of the doors was one of them:

I give full credit to mother nature for her totally psychedelic meanderings, but this was a little much for me. Sam joined me on the dark side when we opened the door that it was growing over, and found a small waterfall coming down through the doorway. Ok, we agreed, the back house could benefit from a new roof. There are three ways to handle a situation like this:

A.) Hire a Roofer.

B.) D.I.Y. The Proper Way: Take off the old roof. Check to make sure all the structural elements are sturdy, and not rotted out. Replace them if they are. Maybe throw on a nice layer of insulation, and some new roofing.

C.) The Down-And-Out Country Way. I think this one is fairly self-explanatory.

Do I need to tell you which route we took? A picture’s worth a thousand words, so here’s a real nice photo of me slopping tar on all the rusty spots and holes in the roof..

I feel a little bad that I don’t have any pictures of Sam fixing the gutters. But that’s what he was up to. We got a nice long rain that night, and when I opened that door again, our waterfall had taken up residence elsewhere. Its all about the small victories.

In other news, we’ve had a real boatload of exciting firsts. One morning during a cold spell, I came downstairs smelling smoke. Sam had built our very first fire in the summer kitchen! Man, was that nice. And the smoke smell covered a lot of our other current house smells.

The following afternoon we were having a lovely pizza lunch on the lawn, while our house was being baked at 165 degrees to kill all the mold. Leonard had disappeared, and we had been calling him all morning. Dave, one of the house-baker guys, looked surprised, and said “There’s your cat!” We looked over at a furry bump that had seemingly fallen out of the tree overhead. It looked suspiciously like Leonard, but turned out to be a very out-of-sorts raccoon. Dave grabbed a menacing looking board off our porch, and slammed it around, screaming. The raccoon blinked a couple of times, and then sort of drunkenly hobbled and fell back into the brush. A few moments later, it bolted across our yard to the front stone wall, where it took a moment to pose for this charming shot:

Our very first rabid raccoon! A well-seasoned country-living neighbor of ours showed up with a shotgun 10 minutes later, but the raccoon had vanished. Luckily (?) Leonard hadn’t been anywhere near the raccoon, but had been inside the baking house all afternoon… he was a little thirsty, but seemed to be generally in good spirits:

If you are a familiar of Leonard’s, you may notice that his subsequent rabies-free indoor lifestyle has made him a little soft…

Our fun-filled afternoon with Dave the Mold Guy fostered a strong bond. So strong, in fact, that when he heard we didn’t have a fridge yet, he offered us one for free!

I think this thing takes the prize for the filthiest appliance I have ever seen. But it sure does refrigerate. Sam was pretty excited about the fridge, but I think he was secretly more excited that he had found yet another application for the skid-steer.

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”

Gilbert K. Chesterton