The O-Zone

The walls, ceiling, window sills and trim around the outside of the windows and doors – it’s all done.  We need to do some cleaning, a bit of sanding and then more cleaning, before varnishing.  That’s our plan for the weekend.  Tomorrow morning, bright and early, we’ll go to town and get the paint supplies we need, including the blue painters’ tape so we aren’t having to scrape windows.

The floor is the last thing to be completed, and the room is basically square and it is level. It should be quickly installed next week.

We think we’ve identified all the problems and solved them, and it should be smooth sailing from here on.  Things remaining to be completed inside the room are to install the flooring concrete backer board, put down thinset mortar and lay the tiles, and then grout once it all dries.  Then clean and re-seal the tiles.  Then we can put in the outlets, switches, and light.

Dan will start setting traps this weekend for packrats.  The foundation is now rodent-proof (hopefully!)  We had another bear in the yard a couple of days ago.  Terry alerted us to the bear’s presence.  The bear left at fairly high speed, not caring for the sound of a macaw having a fit.

Outside we need to build the deck off the sun room (small landing where the firewood rack will sit.  The concrete under the deck is built and even has Chipmunk tracks in it.

In the immortal words of Alvin, "What's all over my feets???"

Siding for the sun room hasn’t been started yet and needs to be done before we can install the exterior light and outlet, and then we have to paint the outside.  Also remaining is to build the small deck and stairs outside our bedroom, and it also needs concrete pads built for the foundation.  Once all those things are done, then we can spread the dirt and gravel which are in huge piles in our yard and driveway.

Then we can plant grass seeds and sit back and watch the grass grow as the most exciting thing we have planned for the rest of the year.

Lilac outside our bedroom windows is in full bloom.

The Bleeding Heart plant by the front steps is taller this year, and with so much commotion around the place, it hasn't been munched flat by deer... yet.

Last year we mulched and fertilized the flower bed by the front door, and for the first time since we moved here, we have iris blooms. We have no idea what colors. A surprise!

There should be fawns soon, this week I think.  We’ve seen some pretty porky does in the fields.  They usually use our place for a nursery, so I hope all the construction is done by the end of next week.  Even if they do eat the daisies, the babies are just too cute for words.

If anything went smoothly, I think I’d faint.  Fortunately for me, there’s not much risk of that happening anytime in the near future.

But, at last the French door between the living room and sun room has been installed.  It actually shuts, too, which is quite exciting in the overall scheme of things.

Mishkin finds this a very interesting door, and he puts his nose right at the bottom of it, the better to sniff.

Wide open the two rooms really feel like they could be one space. The pine walls are so pretty and we need to find some UV protective varnish to put on them. That will be our chore for the weekend.

We have sunshine today, to go with our sun room.  Three walls have the pine siding installed, as does the ceiling.  The wall with the French doors does not have any siding yet, as the door took over five hours to be installed today.

Trying to maintain absolute calm.

Today we worked on the initial phase of the flooring installation, that being cleaning the tiles and putting a thin coat of the floor sealer on them.  This will protect them from fingerprints, and keep the thinset cement which glues to them to the floor from sticking to them.  I also got a chance to see how many were cracked or chipped.  Fortunately, having finished with half of the flooring boxes, (18 of 34), I have only found three tiles which are chipped on the corner, and only one tile was actually broken.

I really like the contrast between the smooth and shiny flooring, and the natural color of the pine boards.

A couple of hours break in rainy weather allowed us to set up saw horses and a piece of plywood for a table, in the garage, for our work surface.

The natural stone travertine is going to be tricky to install, as it seems a little more fragile a material than I thought it would be.

It’s neat, Dan reminded me today that the first house he built for us in Alaska had tongue & grove pine boards, like this room will have.  We are coming full circle.  I loved that little house, and no doubt we are going to really enjoy this sun room for many years to come.

Another week winds to a close and our project is starting to actually look like something is happening.  This weekend we have three whole days by ourselves and I’m hoping that we can put up the pine boards on three out of four of the interior walls, and the ceiling.  The sliding glass door needs to be removed before the final wall is finished, and it’s a bit too heavy for us, I think.  Who knows, we might get frisky!

The exterior door is installed (mostly). The foundation still needs to be backfilled and the rodents excluded from access under the house.

We’ve been aiming toward thwarting rodent access from under the house.  That is what started this whole process and have we succeeded in that aim?  No, not even close.  Most annoying but I’m trying to maintain absolute calm.  Or some semblance of it anyway.  I’m not succeeding in being cool, calm or collected particularly well today.  I kind of feel like screaming at the moment.  A hot shower should help!

The windows are all installed, and the weather proofing has been installed. I am not sure the room is rodent proof yet. After the contractor leaves we'll go over it with a fine tooth comb as they're not as careful as I'm the one the rodents drive insane.

Inside the room things are looking nicer and we can see how the room will be when it is finished.

The porch outside this exterior door still needs to be built, and it is a long way from even being started. Hopefully it won't be too long from now to be finished.

The French door between this room and our living room is inside now, and much closer to its final destination.

It’s been a long several weeks.  So much for our estimates of how long any of this would take, but it will be absolutely delightful when it is finished, and we can see the end to the mess is drawing near.

It’s really funny, but Mishkin won’t go beyond the sliding glass door.  He will sniff but won’t poke his head over the threshold.  I did carry him into the new room and told him it will be his most favorite place of all soon.  He wasn’t so sure, and wasn’t interested in stepping on the floor.  Silly kitty.  He doesn’t approve of change.

It keeps raining, which is good I guess.  We certainly need the moisture after such a dry winter, but we have this really big pile of dirt that needs to be spread around and right now all we would get is mud.  Massive amounts of mud.  Perhaps next week the weather will improve and we can have some sun with our sun room.  Here’s hoping!

First thing this morning, we sorted out the problem of differing heights of the floor between our existing living room and the sun room addition to the house.  It was a somewhat lengthy process but finally everybody understands what we want, and we all decided how to get there from here.

Once that was agreed upon, the exterior walls could be framed and are now supporting the roof, which is also now level for the first time since it was constructed!

Having the sun room on the west side of the house actually balances the entire structure. And what is more exciting is the expensive materials which were littering the yard are now being assembled where they belong. Always a nice feeling.

Tomorrow the framing will be completed, and sheathing the walls, Tyvek wrap, windows, an exterior door installed, and backfilled around the foundation.  This is all what we hope will be accomplished.  Time will tell, but things are starting to move along quickly.

We have also decided how we want the ceiling to be in the addition, a simpler framing than our original plan.  Sometimes, though, simpler is better.

We’ve been having amazingly cold weather.  Yesterday morning it was 29F when we woke up.  This morning it was in the mid 30’s.  And cooler weather is still in the forecast, along with rains.  That should make moving dirt around tomorrow muddy, to say the least!

Dark clouds tell the tale of things to come, sunshine will not be one of those things in our immediate future.

I've always loved the color contrast between heavy rain clouds and the fresh bright green of Aspen leaves.

Yeah….  That will teach me to mock Mother Nature.  Or, maybe not.  I seem to be a slow learner.

Last night, it started doing this. Those aren't speckles on the camera lense because I was standing under the roof overhang.

The Serviceberry blossoms are probably used to such nonsense.

It was a good thing we had covered up the construction materials which were delivered yesterday.  They would have been very soaked.

It kept this up all night, and this morning we had snow sliding off the roofs. It didn't accumulate except on the roof.

This morning Dan found a poor frozen hummingbird laying on the sidewalk.  This sort of weather is very tough on the small animals, especially something as tiny as a hummingbird.  Lots did make it through the night and we’ve already had to refill a feeder or two so far today.

The sidewalk follows the ground contour down near the garage, curving around one of the two large trees between the house and the garage.

Where the yard flattens out there is a fork in the road.

Straight ahead leads to the new sunroom door, and a low deck off the door where the wood rack will sit.

Curving around to the right is the front door.

The sidewalk leads to the newly constructed concrete front porch.  Hurray, no more untreated wood boards just waiting to break someday, and no place for a packrat to hide under the porch.  And no place for a snowshoe hare to hide either.  Poor little things.

Large beams are under the floor joists to support the weight. We are going to have marble tiles for the flooring, travertine actually is what the type of marble is called, and it doesn't like floors that flex.

Inside the house we have a happy parrot.

She doesn't mind having her picture taken while she's in her bath. Sucn an exhibitionist!

It appears that Mishkin has decided to revise his ‘catch and release’ program.  He caught a mouse overnight and it didn’t get far at all before he killed it.  Good kitty!!!  He’s been keeping a beady eye on the contractors today.  He sits by the bottom of the stairs and growls at them.  They left in the middle of the day, for a while, to go pick up different floor joists as they had ordered the wrong size.  Math – any one?

After they leave, Mish runs around the house, making circles and just delighted they are gone.  So am I, to tell the truth.

We woke up on Cinco de Mayo to a fat inch of snow covering everything.

Snow this time of year doesn't last long but it is always startling to see fat flakes flying around the sky.

This last week we finally saw temperatures more in the normal range for this time of year, and lots of flowers are starting to bloom on the hillsides.  The hummingbirds are back in full force, going through three feeders of sugar water a day.

We have also embarked on our sunroom addition to the house.

All nice and neat around the front of the house.

Before we started tearing things apart, it was so peaceful and serene, and it will be again, in a couple of weeks.

This shows the dimensions of the room, as it will mirror the existing deck.

The long outside wall will have four windows, each three feet wide and five feet tall.  The short walls will have either two windows four feet wide and five feet tall, or an exterior door and a window, also four feet wide and five feet tall.  That was the largest window size we could fit into the space available.  The sliding glass patio door is being replaced by a French door which will open up into the space from the living room.  This whole room will greatly increase the airflow in the rest of the house as the living room, at this time, has only a small window on the east side of the house for ventilation.

So, the work begins.  First thing we had to do was to prop up the roof and remove the deck.  This exposed the crawlspace under the living room, and it was really worse than we expected.

For some unknown reason, the guy who built the house didn't put a full foundation on this wall, just piers, and he didn't protect it from rodent infestation. What a moron and a liar since he said that represented to us that the house had foundation walls all the way around.

There is no vapor barrier under the living room floor, and no way to get one under there.  It would need a very small person crawling through years of rodent nests, etc.  Horrifying thought.  On the upside, exposing this crawlspace to air is drying things out significantly, and it will now also have ventilation from vents installed through the side of the sunroom foundation walls.  We also discovered that the logs which had been supporting the roof previously had significant dry rot in them, and would have needed to be replaced soon, regardless.  Timing is everything.

This large pile of dirt has been spread around on the yard, filling in some of the low spots and generally making things level. More top soil will need to be brought in to bring the yard up to the the level of the sidewalks.

The foundation footings are ready to be filled with cement, and we tried to get that accomplished on Friday.  But the cement company sent out a truck with cement that was so incredibly soupy that the driver recommended it be rejected.  Sigh.  This puts us at least half a week behind already.

Awaiting cement.

Exterior wall footing, and the one supporting the center of the floor-to-be.

Hopefully, on Monday, the footings can be poured successfully, and also the front porch will be poured at the same time, which is replacing  the existing untreated boards we have now with a solid concrete porch.

The other thing which is being started is construction of sidewalks from the front door, curving around to join with another sidewalk which will lead from the garage to the sunroom door.  That will make shoveling snow next winter much easier!  We’ll have to bring in more topsoil once the cement sidewalk is cured, and we’re also going to bring in some gravel to fill in a low spot from the end of the driveway to the garage.

We saw our first bear of the year, this morning.  A very large bear, several hundred pounds. I showed Mishkin as he had never seen one before.  He got very tense in my arms but was really much more interested in watching it and didn’t go run and hide.  He didn’t know what it was.  Terry didn’t see the bear as it was in the fenced area down the hill from the house, where she couldn’t see it.  Thank goodness.  She is very loud when she sees a bear.

This bear is doing his best imitation of a lawn mower. Or a sheep, yeah, that's the ticket. A bear in sheep's clothing.

Actually they’ve been back since the 16th of April, when a lone Calliope male flew up to the front of the house and thoroughly checked out the three spots where the feeders hung last year.  I flew off the couch and into the kitchen where I quickly made up a batch of sugar water.  But alas, that one bird had moved on to another location.  He went away hungry 🙁

A couple of days later another one showed up and since then we’ve had at least two male Calliope, and one male Rufous hummingbird around.

This is the smallest bird in North America, perched on the tip of a Crab-apple tree next to the front of our deck.

This morning the weather surprised us with snow showers.  It’s very cool outside and we haven’t seen any of our little hummer friends so far today.  They have probably gone down by the river where it’s a bit warmer.  Silly weather!

We put three nestboxes up, two on the house and one on the back of the garage.  Last year we have a pair of Western Bluebirds using one of the nestboxes on the house.  This year we have a pair of Mountain Bluebirds.

The male is a beautiful powder blue, like a piece of summer sky.

It’s too early for these birds to actually start nesting, but it is definitely time to stake their claim.  They’ve chosen the nest box by the front deck, probably because it has the best view to the west!

Here is his sweetie, being all fluffed at a pair of swallows flying past the nest box. She's perched on the edge of the solar panels.

The solar panels appear to be a popular place to perch among the avian residents around our place.

The Great Gray Owl is back! This largest owl in North America is sitting in the same spot as the hen bluebird was sitting. There is a slight size difference, eh?

We have been so lucky to see this owl hanging around lately.  It just makes our day every time we see this bird.

Sitting on a fence post; it's a great spot for hunting in the field. Their main source of prey is mice and we have an overabundance of those little creatures around here.

A apple tree branch makes a great spot to sit and stare into the dry grass under the branches.

Fortunately for the neighborhood bunnies, the owl would rather have a mouse.

Enjoying a snack of fresh green grass, these bunny buddies are getting along well. And that means pretty soon we'll have baby bunnies bouncing around the yard.

Mish absolutely loves watching the rabbits.  Of course, I’m not saying what he would absolutely love to do with them, but everybody is safe.

Here he is after a long day of bunny-watching, taking his ease on top of his poof.

He is two years old now, officially an adult cat.  He doesn’t see why that should affect his enjoyment of playing with toy mice, not the ones we throw for him or the really good ones that are self-moving.

Last week Dan walked by the door up to the exercise room, and there, sitting on the floor, was a mouse.  So, Dan gets his leather glove and heads upstairs to nab said mouse and throw it outside.  The mouse sees Dan and says, “EEEEEK!” and runs off.  Dan looks and sitting about four feet away was our cat.  Just watching the mouse.  Evidently Mish had been taking a break from the catch-n-release game he as playing with the mouse.  And the mouse was no longer concerned about the cat.  But Dan… well that was a scary sight indeed.

Anyway, it’s his birthday tomorrow.  Happy Birthday Mish!

He puts up with a lot from his pet humans.

Today we’re going to work on getting the electricity functional in the garage.  We have buried the electric wire out to the garage, and now we have to get it hooked up to the panel downstairs and put in an electric outlet so Dan can plug things in, like a drill so he can drill holes for the rest of the wiring.  It’s very exciting stuff.

At least that is what the calendar says.  Hopefully they packed some flannel jammies for the cold nights!  It has been a very cold month so far.

April 5th we woke up to a very heavy, wet and thickly falling two inches of snow.

Solar gain? Nah, just taking the day off from power production.

That day was very gray, and even though the snow didn’t last very long, it was sure a surprise to wake up and see everything white again outside the windows.

This time of year the morning sky can be exceptional with sunrise saturated views.  Yesterday was a good example.  The colors in the sky remind me of this new yarn I just acquired without a real specific project in mind but just because I loved the colors.

Sunlight illuminating high light clouds while we were still in the mountain shadow, and super saturating the distant sky.

This morning the snow continued to fall, turning the ground white albeit only briefly, and filling the air with snowflakes.

Absolutely pouring, so thick it actually accumulates on the ground.

I really need super high speed to catch the fat and speedy flakes. They are very blurry.

Our daffodils poked their heads up above ground and said, collectively, "You've GOT to be kidding!!" and they haven't grown an inch since then. This morning's snowfall, pictured here, has done nothing to encourage them.

Our local pet bunny is turning to his summer coat rapidly.  This picture was taken over the weekend, and already only a few days later he’s almost entirely brown, except for his feet which remain snow white.  I’m sure he can’t believe the snow keeps falling, either.  It interferes with finding yummy short green grass to munch.

Yummmmmmmmmmmm green grass and invisibility. What more could a bunny ask for?

We had a Goshawk in the yard a couple of days ago.  Oh, and did I mention we had a Great Gray Owl visiting? 🙂

Spring time.  We have buttercups blooming again; they first showed their sunny little yellow faces on the Equinox.  Appropriate!  More flowers will be coming soon.  Hummingbirds are a month away now.  We can hardly wait to see their little faces buzzing around feeders.

We saw the 100th bird species on our property a couple of days ago.

A Great Gray Owl. To say we were blown away by this event is an understatement. These owls have a special place in our hearts, last seen in Alaska many years ago.

This species is extremely rare for our county, five sightings have been recorded.  This bird species is so tame; it allowed us to take many pictures, showing us multiple sides of its face.   It’s hard to judge scale but the size ranges from two to three feet long; this bird appeared to be on the smaller side of the scale but again, hard to tell.

Chickadees and nuthatches were flying up close and personal into the owls’ face; we could almost imagine the bird conversation, going something like this:  Chickadee/nuthatch, ” OMG  Who are you?  What are you?  When did you get here?”  Owl, doing a W.C.Fields imitation, “Go ‘way, kid, ya’ bother me.”

Dan was listening to the calls for these birds on his computer, and got this face from Mishkin:

Big eyes. Of course, he has this look on his face frequently around here. There's always something cool to stare at.

Evidently certain calls from predators are hard-wired into cat brains.  He ran upstairs and had to think about it for a bit before venturing back down to the living room.

We added a channel to Kitty TV this past week.  The Popcorn Channel.  There were multiple shows available for Mish’s viewing pleasure.

This was the Clark's Nutcracker show. Also featured were the Jays Hour, Squirrel Comedy Central, and Chipmonk Review.

Snowshoe Hares are turning from snow white to mottled brown, and Mish is beside himself with joy whenever they show their faces in the yard next to the windows.  He is entranced, and spends much time admiring them from afar with delusions of grandeur in regards to the fun they could have running races in the yard.

A Ruffed Grouse making faces at Mishkin who was watching intently from the window next to Terry's cage.

A cat was not sufficiently intimidating to a hungry grouse, and budding leaves on the Service Berry bush were yummy looking prey.

Munch munch munch. Yummmmmmmmm Spring!

Dan has been hearing a Dusky Grouse calling near the house, and we’ve seen a hen running in the yard off and on.  They have a neat call, similar to rubbing your thumb on a fully inflated balloon.  One has to wonder how that evolved as a way to attract females.

We still have smiling faces from our owl visitor.  That memory isn’t going to get old any time soon.