that brown house

neo’s curiosity won him a bath last weekend; not a him licking himself bath, but a tub of tepid water and a human making him very wet and unhappy bath. while we were out on a very disappointing shopping trip on saturday, neo decided to further explore the living room fireplace. we had previously scrubbed the visible portions of both fireplaces after both cats were sniffing around in them on move-in day and hoped that would be the extent of fireplace maintenance until we get around to trying to make one usable at some undefined time in the future. instead neo decided to double as a chimney sweep and get soot all over himself and the living room in the process. so eric and i arrived home to find my mother in a state of agitation and a filthy cat asleep on the sofa. we exiled neo to the outdoors with hopes that he would roll around and roll most of the soot off on the dead grass while i cleaned up the living room and eric went to the pet store to look for that spray that you can use on furniture etc. to keep pets from wanting to scratch or go near the sprayed item. i’m not sure how effective it’s going to be when sprayed on bricks, but eventually we’re going to want to remove the boxes and bags that are currently covering the fireplaces.

left to his own volition, neo didn’t get himself clean enough to not leave black smudges on everything he touched, so first thing sunday morning i decided to give him a bath…a true test for my lovely clean white bathroom. fortunately, neo opted for the wide-eyed oh-woe-is-me-to-have-you-treat-me-this-way attitude instead of being hysterical during the bath, so i was able to contain most of the mess to the tub…if i hadn’t needed to keep both hands on the cat at all times (and the other inhabitants of the house were still asleep) i would have taken a picture…because i doubt anybody would believe how black the bathwater/tub-scum-ring was otherwise. yuck. but i cleaned the bathroom and it remains my oasis of pristine cleanliness and almost-completeness. it’s my happy place.

in other news:

we’ve mostly just been unpacking and puttering around trying to figure out what’s going to go where. progress feels slow to me, but i don’t think i’m going to feel like we’ve made real progress until we get the kitchen set up in a logical way. everything in the kitchen still feels like it is in temporary locations. the lower cabinets are odd sizes (and shallow) and have one fixed shelf that won’t accommodate anything remotely tall, while the bottom “shelf” is the floor. we went shopping for rolling bins to use in lieu of a bottom shelf, but mass-market storage bin sizes just don’t seem to work; in order to get something narrow enough to fit through the cabinet door, we tend to end up with bins that are too small to be useful for pots & pans. while out shopping for kitchen storage solutions, we were also looking at rugs. i had high hopes of getting two inexpensive jute-type area rugs at ikea: a large one to cover the bulk of the kitchen floor and a (matching) small one to cover the missing flooring by the door to the dining room. evidently, my memory is poor or they’ve discontinued some of their rug sizes, because the styles that had larger rugs that worked didn’t have smaller ones that worked and vice versa. anyway, very little progress was made in the kitchen.

we did get the kitchen sink drain fixed last week and have been using the range portion of the stove. cooking on gas burners again is wonderful. hopefully, we can find somebody to fix the oven. i had hoped to get reliance appliance in berkeley to come look at it, however, it slightly pre-dates the ones their service tech does (they date it to late 30s/early 40s) . they told us names of a couple places that are further away, but eric found a place in west oakland, apple stoves, that has done repairs on stoves that date back to 1911. they also do conversions to electric ignition, which is something we may look into come kitchen renovation time…it’s a bit pricey and requires them taking the stove to their shop…however, we now have an appointment with apple to look at our oven this weekend! woo!