Renovation Chaos: Memorial weekend, part 1

I think we've had enough adventures in the past two days to warrant a blog post, even though the weekend is far from over. Plus, I have time to kill before friends arrive for painting and dinner. Boy, do I know how to woo 'em.

We kicked off our weekend with rooftop adventures! Namely, sweeping the incredibly large pile of leaves off of our back pergola. This pile was blocking the exhaust to the stovetop, so while our stove works, we have yet to use it. We probably had a bit too much fun with this task, filling a 1.5 residential trash bins with leaves--only the ones that fell in the bucket on first push off the roof. The remainder of the leaves we swept off the patio for the lawn maintenance people to take care of at a later date. Eric also trimmed a few overhanging branches while we were up there, but the bulk of what we need to trim back will need to be handled by a professional crew, since they are significantly higher.

We also began sorting through some of the belongings in the garage in an effort to get to the table buried under everything. We sorted mostly kitchenware and any of our still-usable "rejects" will be brought to my work next week to find a new home. Whatever is not taken home by someone else will be donated.

Saturday DAY was spent out of the house to give us a bit of down-time, since we have a long weekend full of multiple days of work. We drove around the backroads between our place and Santa Barbara, mostly to give us an excuse to eat at Ca'Dario in SB for our favorite ravioli! We came across a small farmstand on one of the back roads that had a narrow suspension bridge that provided access from the road/farmstand area to their actual farm! The owner very nicely let us cross the bridge and check out the farm on the other side. She said there were pigs roaming about, but, alas, they didn't come out to visit.

Saturday evening requires a bit of backstory. Throughout the week, we've been noticing that some of our foodstuffs that was in the garage were being nibbled on by little critters, making a mess of our cornstarch and flour. To dissuade them from visiting our house, we've been moving the pantry staples into the kitchen and tossing out anything that was previously invaded. Then our hamburger buns INSIDE the house got nibbled on. Uh oh. We promptly applied bits of steel wool to any of the holes that we've been able to locate inside the house and have plans to call a rat-abatement company after the holiday weekend is over. So Saturday evening, I go to refill the drink in the kitchen and hear a noise. While trying to scan for what caused the noise, I see movement in our empty trash/recycling can. Upon further inspection, (read: Gail yelling at Eric to promptly get over here and us cautiously approaching said container) we discovered that we had inadvertently trapped a small, cute specimen of the rodent variety. Like supercute. Now what do we do?! We did not kill it, but took it to an undisclosed location where it could range free in the wilds and fend for itself there. We wish it the best. We still have at least one critter in the attic since we heard something scurrying about this morning, but we now have one less.

Upon return, we looked for further holes to fill with steel wool and I did something that I will not mention that could have landed me a page in the next Darwin Awards book and had me freaking out about a potential fire all night. 'nuff said, moving on. The house is still fire-free this morning. 8-)

This morning we moved some more furniture and stuff into the house, which I will be sorting right after this blog post. And in the process of this, I dropped my phone just right to completely shatter the screen. Oy. Looks like I might be trying out an android phone for a while, since Eric still has his old Nexus 5 and a sim card adapter is MUCH less expensive than a new phone at this stage.