Just Photos: Snow Frolics! December 2009

This post is for pet/animal lovers.  Refer to the post after this one, Forest Living: Snow Scenes, for the details about our storm. 

Everyone appreciated the snow, although some had to adapt.

• Connor -- adapt?  You just have to love it.  He raced around the hillside and forest, and was in motion so much that I had trouble taking pictures.
  
• Ripley, our blind Australian Cattle Dog, was disoriented at first, and we had to shift to some older toys.  But she liked nosing it, sniffing it, and eating it.
  
• Homer-Kitty's fur was useful for something other than weed-gathering. He accompanied us on our walk down the road, and went outside every time I took the dogs out.  He rolled in the snow, skated on the ice, climbed the trees, and generally frolicked.
  
• The twins (18 month old kittens) were new to this, but that didn't stop them long.  They had great fun in the powder stuff.  Whiz (WYSIWYG), in particular, would have mad moments of rushing around grabbing armfuls of powder and looking insane.  Then when it iced over, it became a skating rink.  Worried about falling?  Not them.
  

Homer-Kitty likes pedestals.

(He's the stray kitten who wandered onto our building site; we think he is 2.5 years now.)

On the walk, Ripley & Connor on flexi's, Homer in the ditch on the right.

Ripley (12 years old), little blind trooper.  Doesn't let disabilities slow her down.

Busy busy busy.  Homer has so much personality that it is sometimes odd to realize how small he is.

Ripley with her old pre-surgery toy. When she was blind but still had her eyes, this was the only toy she could handle. I could throw it, it has a repetitive song, and she could find it and retrieve it. After she recovered from her surgery early this year, she refused to play with this anymore, and went back to the more "technical" hard rubber balls. I think the surgery to remove her eyes also removed her pain.  Today I throw balls along the ground (sometimes bouncing) and she retrieves. She's amazingly quick and it is hard sometimes to remember she is blind. However, the powdery snow meant we had to go back to this toy.  But as soon as it was icy, she rejected it again.

Wysiwyg (whizzy-whig), next to my lemon tree (which seems to be okay). 

Can you do this?

(It has to be such fun to be a cat!)

Grabbing armfuls of powder, a new sport.  Whiz cavorted in circles, sliding down the hill.

In Connor's defense, here is the proof that he doesn't always start these things!

BCOS (Black Cloud Over Snow), little kitty, so hard to get a picture of him in the snow.

In most shots he looks like a black rock.

When I shot this one, Homer had just started to move.  The next shot would have shown him peacefully sitting on a boulder, after alluding Connor with a zig-zag trail that bounced off at least one tree.

So much to watch.

Blind Cattle Dog roaming cross-country.  Independent?  You think?

Just Photos: Our Sleeping Loft

This Labor Day Holiday (first weekend in September 2009) I decided to finish our Sleeping Loft.

The Sleeping Loft was a great idea that Dietmar Lorenz, our project architect, suggested as DSA developed the design details. However, later, when we encountered plan check (an interesting process that I will describe in more detail in a future chapter), our plan checker did not like the stair access from the guest bedroom to the loft, nor the sleeping loft concept. He believed it was dangerous, that someone could get hurt.

The compromise was to label the room an attic loft on the plans, and to provide access through pull down stairs that are in the corridor outside the guest bedroom and bathroom (see the first set of pictures here).


When the stairs are extended they intrude into the hallway, but there is still room to walk around them. We also sacrificed a closet, but we gained closet space in the guest bedroom.

The attic has 2 deep bale windows, and the west and north bale walls are finished like the rest of the house, as are the south loft and east interior walls, but the builder left the floor unfinished (it's an attic) and we have used it as a somewhat awkward attic as we've settled in. Nevertheless, I've continued to be intrigued with the potential for this room, wanted to do something, and just wasn't sure what or how.

The room is interesting, very secluded from the rest of the house yet with windows and views into it. The bale window on the west wall outlines a lush green Douglas Fir; the bale window on the north wall frames the view across the front drive to one of my favorite oak trees and the garden area. My camera (or my photographic skill) doesn't do these windows justice -- the light isn't this harsh and the room isn't this dark -- but here are some pictures that give you some idea of how interesting this is.



The east wall of the room has a spy window, a twin to a spy window in the pop-up (quilt room). This interior window allows anyone in the room to spy into the gallery, directly across to the quilt room through the other window, and down into the stairwell/living room.

The south wall is the partial loft wall, with an open airy feeling.

Which also means that whoever is in the guest bedroom needs to be comfortable with whoever is staying in the sleeping loft, but then that was the case with our plan before the plan checker interfered. This is overflow sleeping for times when we have several people staying here, not a place to live.


Before Labor Day weekend, the room had an ugly, dirty-plywood, unfinished floor, and was full of, well, storage that someone else would call junk perhaps. It was junk we wanted to keep, but cluttered and disorganized -- things we stashed there.  I had a vision of what this room could be -- notice there is no floor in this picture, it's a picture I took after I changed the room because it illustrates my plan -- and the more I thought about this, the more I wanted to do something.


While I've lived here (about 20 months now), I kept thinking about solutions. I considered buying an inexpensive large indoor/outdoor carpet, but the room dimensions are awkward (a long rectangle, with a cutout for the stairs). I thought of buying several remnant carpets. Of cutting them up. None of this was appealing. And so I wouldn't think about it for a while.

Then I started thinking about carpet tiles, investigated them on the web, and I had my solution, if I was brave enough to do this. (I'm not confident about my handyman skills.)



The Flor tiles I purchased are just under 20 inches square.

1. First step was figuring out how many tiles to order. I needed a plan for how I would lay them out. I used spreadsheet software to map out the floor (made the cells into squares and assigned each a dimension of 2 inches) and decided on a checkerboard design
   
2. I ordered the tiles -- including a few more than I needed.
3. I downloaded the instructions, which was particularly good because I needed to buy or borrow a few things -- a carpet knife, something to mark the floor, and a 24 inch carpenter's square. I was a bit intimidated, but the instructions were clear.
   
4. I cleaned the floor several times to get it as dust and debris free as possible.
   

The actual installation (after cleaning, assembling tools, and having a plan) took 2 afternoons.

1. The first step was to establish the center of the room. The instructions said to measure from opposite corners and mark the floor. Where these lines intersect is the center.
   
2. Then you draw lines through this center to the center of each wall, and that establishes your grid.
   
3. The layout begins at the middle -- I created a T that went between the north and south walls and over to the west wall. (The pull down stairs opening is on the east side.)
   
4. Once I was comfortable with the carpet tile grid, I trimmed the tiles at the ends of the T, a little tricky with uneven bale walls, and then attached them to each other using the Flor spots.
   
5. I then filled in the NW and SW corner sections before heading east toward that last wall with the interesting deviations.

The part I was most worried about was the opening for the pull down stairs. I knew I would have to cut tile in odd shapes, and that the bale wall was particularly irregular there.

It was somewhat tricky, but not as difficult as I expected. I didn't attempt to keep the checkerboard going along the bale wall, and that seemed fine considering the tile was framing the opening for the stairs.

The unexpectedly difficult corner was the junction of the south loft wall and the east house wall. Since these were not bale walls, I thought this would be easier. But I had overlooked the little jog in the wall that goes around a support beam, and then it wasn't exactly straight (the tile layout is sensitive to about 1/8 inch).

Again I deviated by using more of the charcoal tiles versus staying with the checker board pattern, and I'm happy with the result.

Also I want to mention Homer-Kitty, who kept track of my activities and was the first one to sleep in the loft. However, he doesn't like cameras.

The final picture -- here is our sleeping loft today. It's a very nice room. The disadvantage is the pull down stair access. But particularly when I was a kid, I would have loved staying in this room, and I like just being in it today.

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Just Photos: Gardens, Cats

Sharing pictures from this weekend.

Behind the house (south side); the garden here is primarily roses, but a few petunias and others. We walk past these in the mornings and evenings when we're here, along with the dogs and often the cats -- we walk in the forest at dawn and in the evening.





One of my favorite roses is Fragrant Cloud. I bought my first one years ago in Morgan Hill, and it spent about 8 years in a pot. It survived the move here and is doing very well. This is a picture of a rose from my second bush -- I love this rose – great color, lots of blooms, and an intense scent. The other is right outside our bedroom window and sometimes I can smell the roses at night -- making it easy to stop and smell them. :-)




Behind the house again, SW corner garden -- and that cat is BCOS (Black Cloud Over Snow) -- he's taking advantage of the nice breeze to cool his tummy.




WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get), in the shade on that same porch.




Homer-Kitty in the driveway yesterday. He is the stray who showed up at our building site about two years ago. He is a superb rodent hunter -- has managed all my gopher problems. I attended a master gardener session yesterday morning and one question was about gophers. The response? The best solution is a cat.




A few shots from the upper garden, or orchard? Most of our fruit/nut trees are up there as well as blueberries, rhubarb, onions, tomatoes, cantaloupe, squash (several kinds), beets, cucumbers, corn, beans, peas, peppers. That sounds like a lot, but it isn't all producing. I was late getting it in and I'm learning a lot about gardening here this year. The onions have been great. The others are just coming in so we'll see.

Today I planted some carrots for the fall, as well as more beets. The garden is a long narrow bench above the garage. The trees are all very young -- new this year -- we have cherry, apricot, apple (3), peach (2), plum (2), nectarine, and walnut. The walnut and one of the apples are not in this garden -- they're behind the house.



That's what it looked like here this sunny late summer weekend. Weather here has been in the low eighties with a mild breeze. Almost feels like a touch of fall in the air, but I know we have many long summer days ahead of us.

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