Skunked

Let’s start this post with a brief recap: I have had suspicions that a skunk was living under our shed for about four years. I chose to deal with this problem with denial. But then I saw the skunk, and, forced to confront the situation, spent my time fretting, Googling, and calling exterminators. My regular exterminator wanted $495 to get rid of the skunk for a guaranteed six months. A competitor wanted $200 to get rid of this skunk, but $200 “and up” - depending upon the extent of the work and materials needed - to ensure that another skunk couldn’t come set up housekeeping under the shed. It was the “and up” part that concerned me there. Especially because our shed is basically built on top of a sand pit where a hot tub was kept once upon a time, so it’s really easy for skunks to burrow under it. Yes, we know NOW that we shouldn’t have put it over the sand pit, but where were you seven years ago, hmmm?

So instead of paying someone, we chose to toss some mothballs under there and cross our fingers. And it seemed to work! We stopped smelling skunk! Until last week! We just barely had time to start denying it when it snowed, and I found this in the driveway:


If you Google images of skunk tracks, you see… basically this.

And THIS:
How many ARE there?

At this point, I became convinced that we had not just one skunk, but an entire extended family of skunks, that probably grew fat on the tulip bulbs that I planted last fall. I mention that awkwardly here only because I already missed my chance of using the eaten tulip bulbs to foreshadow the skunk discovery, but I still wanted to complain about it because I’ve wanted to plant bulbs for years and this was the first year I ever remembered before the ground froze, and even still I ended up doing it at the last possible second on the last possible fall Saturday during the last possible moments of daylight. I suppose I have no PROOF that that it was the skunk and not a squirrel or cat or something else that ate my bulbs, but I choose to blame the skunk.

I followed the tracks back to the shed and I think I may have determined the point of entry:



That’s where I put all the flour down last summer but never saw any tracks. There are actually plenty of ways to get under the shed though, because of the whole “built on a sand pit” thing. So maybe this entrance is the winter entrance.

AT ANY RATE. I started calling exterminators again. The prices were all over the place. Lots of places don’t do skunks, but of the places that do, I was quoted:

$155 for the first trap, $75 for every additional trap
$495 no matter how many skunks there are, guaranteed for six months (my regular guy)
$325 for eradication with a one year guarantee; $50-$100 additional for exclusion with a lifetime guarantee
$150 per trap; $150 “and up” additional for exclusion
$125 just to come out and inspect, price quote after inspection

Now that last one is for a humane removal company. When I expressed surprise at the charge just to inspect, he said “You’ll pretty much find that across the board.” Clearly, I did not. Maybe other humane removal companies would have charged for an inspection as well. There’s not much to inspect, really, when you’re just setting a trap.

To make a long story short (too late!) we hired the $155 guy. And I’m also going to find out what he charges for yearly ant spraying, because it turns out my regular guy has outrageous skunk removal prices, even if he does have a flat fee no matter the number of skunks. I now think (hope) there’s only one, because the guy said those tracks could be from one skunk going back and forth on the same path, and also it’s too early for kits as it’s not quite mating season yet. In a perfect world I’d lead the skunk peacefully to a nice warm den in a cozy forest by a meadow, but that is not in the cards for the skunk under our shed, I’m sad to say.

So the trap is set. The traps only go for $50 or so on Amazon, but let’s be honest, we’re not paying for the setting of the trap, we’re paying for the REMOVAL of the trap. THAT is the part I wanted to avoid. Last summer, the man at animal control told me that it is against the law to release a trapped skunk, that we’d have to kill it, and I remain flummoxed at the idea that anyone would TRY to release a trapped skunk. Do you load the trap into your car and drive it out to the woods? How? I know an animal in a trap can’t bite or scratch you because it can’t reach you, but I’m not worried about skunk BITES.

In other totally unrelated news, I am typing this out in our former bedroom, now our office, and it is absolutely delightful to have a room dedicated to office work. We are plugging away at getting the house set up and getting used to the two-floor living, but it’s pretty awesome. Our space literally doubled. We have a playroom now. A playroom! Right now, there are virtually no toys in the living room at all. And we got to move the changing table/dresser out of the kitchen and put it in there and now our kitchen is huge.

They Gleam

We had our floors refinished this week. This is huge. Huge huge huge. For one thing, when we scheduled the work with the floor guy, he said we’d be able to get back into the house on Thursday, so we made plans to repaint our living room on Thursday since Andrew serendipitously already had that day off. Today was Thursday. Do you know what we did today? We painted the living room! Because the floors were finished when he said they would be! It went perfectly smoothly! I’m still reeling a bit from the shock of it.

For another thing, I thought that refinishing the floors was at least a year or two away because of the expense and logisitics, but it was something that I dreamed about doing because our floors were terrible. No, they were terrible. No, no, you don’t have to be polite. They were TERRIBLE. Look:

Dining room


Living room


Landing


Kids' room


Our room


Where they put down the can of popcorn ceiling stuff

When we bought the house at the peak of the market, we were young and stupid and thought, “Oh, we can fix that!” about a lot of things. And while we have, in fact, fixed quite a lot of things, it is taking a lot longer and requiring a lot more dollars than we ever imagined it would. And when we tore up the (disgusting) rugs in the upstairs apartment, we discovered that what appeared to be finished-if-damaged hardwood was actually only finished around the edges of the living and dining rooms, and the middle of these rooms was unfinished pine, because why bother finishing boards that are only going to be covered by a rug, sayeth early-20^th-century builders. Later owners apparently sayeth the same about protecting the wood while painting and applying popcorn ceiling. What is the point, really, if you’re just going to put down wall-to-wall, right?

So. That is what we were dealing with. And it was fine, whatever. You get used to stuff. It was unpleasant, and it was hard to clean under the dresser in our bedroom where the popcorn ceiling detritus basically acted as Velcro to dust, and there were hug e gaps between the pine boards into which the children could insert quarters, and spilling anything wet on the unfinished part of the floor meant that that beverage was absorbed into the wood forever, but, honestly, it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. First of all, despite how terrible the floors were once we tore up the rugs, they were better than the RUGS were, because, Lord, those rugs were nasty. There was a CRUNCHY spot in the bedroom. So, yes, I hated the floors, but floors are only a small part of life, you know?

But, man, I love our floors now.

Dining room


Living room


Landing


Kids' room


Our room


Where they put down the can of popcorn ceiling stuff  

Upheaval

We are having our floors refinished. This is major, folks. Really major. It came about when my father-in-law helped us take up the rug in what will be Jack’s room in the downstairs apartment – wait, let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

We own a two-family house that contains two two-bedroom apartments. We rented out the downstairs apartment until last year, but we have three children and two bedrooms and it was getting crowded. So we are taking over both apartments. Because our children are young, we can’t sleep on separate floors, since that would be sleeping in different apartments. So the plan was to convert the downstairs living room into our bedroom and put the kids in the downstairs bedrooms. Yes, it is going to be weird, but we will be used to it very soon, because people get used to things like this fast. And yes, in a traditional house the bedrooms are upstairs, but the upstairs kitchen is leaps and bounds better than the downstairs kitchen. So this way makes more sense.

We hired a guy to drywall and replace woodwork in the downstairs living room and we were all set to start moving in when, whoops! Turns out our entire house needed to be rewired or our insurance company would drop us! Ha ha ha! $6500 later, our contractor informed us that the main gas line in the house, which was original to the house, ran the entire length of the attic (so as to better feed the gas-chandeliers, you see) and was old and liable to snap at any moment. Ha ha ha! $1500 later, and our house is much, much less likely to burn down. So that’s good. But it also brought us to September or something, and left a lot of patched up holes in the walls. But! We soldier on.

We spent the winter thinking a lot about painting and choosing colors and actually doing some painting while also talking about rugs and floors and furniture layouts and so forth. This was all around regular living, and we are very slow renovators. Eventually, we painted all the rooms that MUST be painted before we move, and it was during this time that my FIL saw the state of the floor in what would be Jack’s room, and was horrified. Fair enough, because the floors in my house are, frankly, horrifying. I’m not talking “those cheap laminates are not to my taste,” here. I’m talking, “The living room and dining rooms have huge unfinished pine in the middle and the finished boards in all the rooms are all covered in stains and paint spatter and spackle and who knows what all.” In our room, for example, you can actually see where they put down the can when they were painting, because the spatter left a nice paint-can silhouette.  But we’ve been living with it like this for seven years because floors are such a pain and are expensive, and we had to do other things first. (Did you see our “before”kitchen?)

BUT THE TIME HAS COME. On Monday, a guy is coming to refinish all the floors except for the downstairs living and dining rooms because 1) they have wall-to-wall that we put in so they’re in decent shape and 2) we need those rooms to pile all our stuff into while he does the rest of the house. We will hopefully do those rooms in the summer when we go away, but we shall see.

I am so excited to have this done. The floors are truly terrible. And as a bonus, we are going to paint the upstairs living room which is long overdue, but which we have been putting off because moving the furniture out of that particular room is so daunting. So we will strike while the iron is hot; ie, while the furniture is out of the room for other reasons, at any rate.

I have a bunch more boring details that I am refraining from telling you, about how we chose the paint colors, and how we rushed out to buy paint before Sandy and before last weekend’s blizzard but then of course did not paint during either storm (I can’t remember why for Sandy, but we were a smidge busy with snow removal last weekend). (Oh, wait, now I should explain: We are going to paint the downstairs dining room the same beige as the upstairs living room. We can’t paint upstairs until after the floors because the furniture has to be out, but we thought we might try to paint downstairs.)

It’s happening agin. I’m becoming the person who talks endlessly about paint, rugs, floors, curtains, etc, etc, etc. And I’m on a Lenten Twitter fast, so you will get to hear ALLLLL about it in the upcoming weeks.

I will post some before and after pictures, but Andrew and his dad moved a bunch of stuff downstairs today, so I have to dig up some before pictures of the furnished upstairs apartment so you can see the nice new living room color.

And after we finish painting the two living rooms, the dining room, the main entry way, and the two bedrooms, we get to paint a kitchen, two bathrooms, another bedroom, and two apartment entryways.  And then break through a wall. But more on that later.

Fine motor skills

Excuse me while I brag just a little, but Nora, who is three, made a Valentine for her teacher. First she cut along the line I drew for her to make a heart, which she glued onto red paper:


Look at that cutting! I swear I did not help her at all, other than to offer encouragement when she initially failed to follow the curve.

Then, completely unprompted, she cut another heart out all on her own:


Can you see the heart-like shape? She also wrote her own name, but that part was strongly prompted by me. Still, though, I think it's pretty good.

Jack's fine motor skills aren't too shabby either. Look at the Lego space shuttle he and his dad assembled:


Not too shabby, I'd say.

Blizzard pictures

The drifting amazed me.


That rectangular area is the snow that was UNDER the car.












That is Jack in the air, there.

It sounds like it's from a horror movie

For her preschool class's Christmas Grab, Nora got a musical jewelry box. It's the kind where you open the lid to make the music start, and there is a little ballerina who spins around. I remember my sister had a green one with a ballerina when we were kids, and I remember it fondly. My sister's played "Music Box Dancer," and we used to play with it all the time. I loved it.

Nora's plays "The Unicorn Song." (You know? "Green alligators and long-necked geese/ Humpy-backed camels and chimpanzees/ Cats and rats and elephants as sure as you're born/ But the loveliest of all was the unicorn") But while my sister's music box played a lovely, if tinkly, version of "Music Box Dancer," Nora's music box is juuuuuust a titch out of tune. Or even more than a titch. Really kind of a lot out of tune, actually. Hilariously, astoundingly, gloriously, out of tune. Also, the ballerina broke off immediately. Then the key for winding up the music broke off about twenty minutes later, but that was a blessing, really.

I tried to describe the degree of out-of-tuneness to Andrew when he got home that night, but he didn't really believe me. Sure, he nodded and smiled and said, "Yes, wow, sounds pretty bad," but all the while he was secretly thinking, "How bad can it possibly be?"

Well. Nora managed to jam the key back into the winding mechanism, so you can all bear witness to how bad it can be.

Pretty bad.

Music box from Maureen on Vimeo.

Cruising

She's getting better!

MVI 4383 from Maureen on Vimeo.