Behold, I can summon cats at will.
My brother Hugh came round earlier and helped me strip all of the wallpaper from our small bathroom.
We have two bathrooms, for historic reasons. The flat dates back about 100 years (I think), and started out with an absolutely tiny toilet/bathroom - when we moved in it consisted of a room about 15 feet long by about three feet wide, with a shower tray taking up the entire width of the room at the window end, and then a toilet _in front of it_ taking up 2/3 of the width of the room, so you had to slide around it to get into the shower.
This didn't matter that much, because there's another bathroom at the other end of the flat, clearly snipped out of a master bedroom by a subsequent tenant, and much more reasonable in size (with a bath and everything!), and so the smaller bathroom has been used largely as a storage room for the last few years.
However, we've had three of the rooms done up, and we're having the kitchen sorted later this year, so it made sense to have the small bathroom updated too, so that potential future buyers wouldn't look around the flat saying "Oooh, I like the bedroom, and the living room, and the study, and the kitchen, and...what the fuck is going on in this room?" - particularly as there's an old water storage tank in the original bathroom that isn't hooked up any more, so we can get that ripped out, make the whole place look nicer, and put in a small window to let light through into the hall.
So, in preparation for plumbers, et al, coming round on Monday Hugh came round today and we spent and hour steaming off the wallpaper. Which was very hot work, especially at the end, when we took it in turns up a step ladder taking wallpaper off the ceiling. It was at least ten degrees warmer up there, and my glasses were constantly steamed up, so we had the window open into the garden.
Lo and behold, fifteen minutes after Hugh leaves there's a thump sound from the shower, and a cat comes wandering into the hall, clearly wondering where this new, never-before-opened window leads to, seems somewhat surprised to discover it connects to our flat, and then demands to be let back out the kitchen window.
Which I do, and then fifteen minutes after that, when the room is no longer doing an imitation of a sauna, I close the bathroom window, and settle in to watch s01e03 of Breaking Bad. Which continues to be so stressful that I can only watch it in short bursts. Good though.
A couple of hours later, I'm coding away (fun and games with javascript, I seem to finally be making my app do what I want, and enjoying the experience of changing it from being based on server-side templating to being a web app), and I grab some beef from the fridge to snack on.
Seven seconds later there's a movement on the edge of my vision. The tip of a tail wanders behind my chair. And when I look down a face looks back at me. And it says, "Miaow".
I have now located the cat's sleeping position (sofa in the living room) and cleaned off the fur it left behind, so hopefully Julie's allergies won't be too bad. And the cat has been escorted from the premises. And, with any luck, I shall remember that when I close all the windows I should check _then_ for the existence of a dozing cat.
Just in case.
Original post on Dreamwidth - there are
comments there.
We have two bathrooms, for historic reasons. The flat dates back about 100 years (I think), and started out with an absolutely tiny toilet/bathroom - when we moved in it consisted of a room about 15 feet long by about three feet wide, with a shower tray taking up the entire width of the room at the window end, and then a toilet _in front of it_ taking up 2/3 of the width of the room, so you had to slide around it to get into the shower.
This didn't matter that much, because there's another bathroom at the other end of the flat, clearly snipped out of a master bedroom by a subsequent tenant, and much more reasonable in size (with a bath and everything!), and so the smaller bathroom has been used largely as a storage room for the last few years.
However, we've had three of the rooms done up, and we're having the kitchen sorted later this year, so it made sense to have the small bathroom updated too, so that potential future buyers wouldn't look around the flat saying "Oooh, I like the bedroom, and the living room, and the study, and the kitchen, and...what the fuck is going on in this room?" - particularly as there's an old water storage tank in the original bathroom that isn't hooked up any more, so we can get that ripped out, make the whole place look nicer, and put in a small window to let light through into the hall.
So, in preparation for plumbers, et al, coming round on Monday Hugh came round today and we spent and hour steaming off the wallpaper. Which was very hot work, especially at the end, when we took it in turns up a step ladder taking wallpaper off the ceiling. It was at least ten degrees warmer up there, and my glasses were constantly steamed up, so we had the window open into the garden.
Lo and behold, fifteen minutes after Hugh leaves there's a thump sound from the shower, and a cat comes wandering into the hall, clearly wondering where this new, never-before-opened window leads to, seems somewhat surprised to discover it connects to our flat, and then demands to be let back out the kitchen window.
Which I do, and then fifteen minutes after that, when the room is no longer doing an imitation of a sauna, I close the bathroom window, and settle in to watch s01e03 of Breaking Bad. Which continues to be so stressful that I can only watch it in short bursts. Good though.
A couple of hours later, I'm coding away (fun and games with javascript, I seem to finally be making my app do what I want, and enjoying the experience of changing it from being based on server-side templating to being a web app), and I grab some beef from the fridge to snack on.
Seven seconds later there's a movement on the edge of my vision. The tip of a tail wanders behind my chair. And when I look down a face looks back at me. And it says, "Miaow".
I have now located the cat's sleeping position (sofa in the living room) and cleaned off the fur it left behind, so hopefully Julie's allergies won't be too bad. And the cat has been escorted from the premises. And, with any luck, I shall remember that when I close all the windows I should check _then_ for the existence of a dozing cat.
Just in case.
Original post on Dreamwidth - there are
comments there.