House pics!

Our laptop has been pouty lately. We've had to do several mammoth
"system restores" and only today have we been able to reinstall the picture-loading function.

We have been so excited to show you all pictures of our newly remodeled “master” bedroom, so here goes! Honestly, in comparing before/after images, we definitely think this is the most dramatically different room in the house!

As you can see in the first picture, the bedroom formerly hosted a black carpet, a built-in dresser type thing, and paneling that was bowing in in some places. Also, please note the lovely suspended ceiling. As in, “Look! It’s JUST LIKE being at work!”

This bedroom also had three layers of flooring. We quickly determined that the previous homeowners had what we call the “compounding” philosophy, whereby they simply built over things when they wanted to put in new things. Apparently they did not adhere to the common “demo before remodel” construction philosophy. (Our bathroom, for instance, had seven floors by the time we worked our way through.)

Anyway, due to the multitudinous layers of flooring (two carpets, a nice orange powdery substance that was formerly a carpet pad, one awful linoleum-type thing shellacked to the subfloor…..) our bedroom door couldn’t close unless you wedged really, really hard. The topmost layer – illustrated here – was a dramatic black carpet (and by dramatic I mean astonishingly depressing cat-hair magnet).

So, we tore the walls down to studs, demolished the built-in bureaus, and tore out the suspended ceiling, gaining us an extra three feet of floor space and an extra seven inches of ceiling space. To most people, it wouldn’t mean a lot, but with our tiny house, it opened up vistas!

The new hardwood brightens everything amazingly and we love our clean new walls and baseboard. And did I mention the AWESOME new walk-in closet?!?

So, now that we are so happy, and Ronin is (obviously) happy, you might be thinking, But is the cat now at peace? I know you have followed her travails and are concerned about her emotional and psychological well-being. Is Akira also happy, you ask, now that the majority of construction and displacement is done? Does she no longer pee in inauspicious locales?

No such luck. Much to my dismay, Akira has commandeered none other than, yes, you guessed it, our brand-spanking new walk-in closet as her new preferred loo. Go figure.