Our Own, Private Dahmer Dungeon

Rob calls this our prison room.

The "crawl space" of our house is taller than I am. You enter it from the back yard, not from the house, so I've taken to calling it a detached basement.

Since we have to redo our foundation, we have decided to dig this out enough for it to be real living space.

We'll live in the house while the work is being done and then move into this new, downstairs living area while the "upstairs" is redone.

Originally we wanted to wait until the foundation/basement was complete and move directly into this new space, but the recent break-in has made us anxious to make our presence felt. We even threw a small party this past weekend, partially to let friends see it before we transformed it and partially to send a message to the neighborhood kids that the house is NOT deserted.

We're Moving In!

When we met with the engineer who is designing our new foundation/basement, we learned we would be able to live in the house while the foundation was being repaired. We need to fix a few things -- hot water heater, anyone? -- before we can move in, but one of our biggest priorities is making the kitchen usable.

Rob ripped out the old, icky cabinets. There was so much grease caked on them that the doors stuck together when I put them in the trash. Gross!!!

Domino's Delivers

I was contacted by a location scout who wanted to shoot a Domino's commercial at the house because "it looks like the kind of place a muffler repair guy would live."

I called Rob to see what he thought. He said, "Sure. As long as they don't damage the place."

We spent a day or two fantasizing about how we'd spend the money, but they never called to book it.

Security Breach

While I was away on business, someone went into our back yard and stole a beautiful planter Rob has had since before we met. Bastards!

A couple of days later, kids tagged the back of our house, our trashcans, etc. with grease pen. They also built themselves a weird clubhouse out of an old headboard and some plywood. I'd call in a party room, but they didn't leave any cigarette butts or beer bottles. How considerate.

While we were cleaning up, we discovered they had jimmied open a back window and gotten into the house. I was pretty pissed, but Rob took it in stride; he felt that, as vandalism goes, we got off easily. He saw it as a wake up call to better secure the place. I'm not disagreeing, but I was still pretty pissed.

I tried to paint over the graffiti, but our siding is so crappy that painting over the tags can't really be called an improvement. It did make me feel better, though, kind of like a dog peeing to reclaim his territory.

I did leave one piece of "art" untouched. When we went on vacation in Switzerland last year, Rob took pictures of every piece of penis graffiti we saw. After that, how could I not leave this "decoration" on our hot water heater closet?!?

Well Hung!

We got the door to the garage up almost a month ago, (and by "we", I mean Rob) but I've been traveling a lot for work and haven't had time to post.

I'm left with a new appreciation for hinges.