Hovel

Start the season with pruning.

I decided to go with another gas company to save money. Mistake. Didn’t save money because of turnover costs. More importantly we discovered a large leak in the pipe under the house. We could smell and hear it, but not see it. I’m really glad I asked the gas dude to turn it all on and light the stove pilot light because if I did it I wouldn’t have noticed the leak and it probably would have accumulated under the house until it blew. It probably would have been an explosion large enough to blow me to Mt. Lassen.

Sometimes, things move along so slowly and the end seems impossibly distant. I want to just hang it all up. I mean, I literally got the idea to stop all this silliness and just hang up hammocks everywhere. Just use the house as a shell to hang around in. 

I moved out of my house right away. Not because of the Sav-More situation and the lack of facilities, but because the place depressed me. Why? It’s a filthy hovel. 

I moved into the hovel. Something needed to change. I just had to do it. Things haven’t progressed in months. I figured if I live there I’ll have to deal with it. Even though there is no water and minimal electrical. I have to go to Save-Mor to poop and the coffe shop to wake up. Like I said, insane.

Nothing is simple in this place. I just wanted to texture and paint a tiny 4’ X 6’ room - a laundry room.

Things have been busy at the hovel the last few weeks. Leslie and I built 2 new planters for growing veggies. Just for fun, and just in case civilization takes a serious dive soon and we start experiencing food shortages.

Barney lends a hand! New framing and some sheathing My entry was in rough shape. Barney has been telling me he would stop by to give me a hand. He did last week and we decided that working on the entry would be a good project. We quickly decided to peel off a layer to see what was going on underneath. Before you know it, the whole thing was demolished.

Some people are afraid of color in their homes. Or maybe they just don’t care about color. I was one of those people. I thought that walls in a home should just disappear, that it’s what you hang on them that matters. Maybe color on walls can take away from whatever it is you want to hang on them. But life is too short to live in a beige world, I think. 

While working on the house, I’ve been working on these two as well. It’s getting better. Spanky (the cat) want to snuggle, while Rou wants to herd. This is the compromise. A somewhat tenuous truce but the beginnings of a real truce nonetheless.