I had another few posts queued up to write, but this popped up out of nowhere. We woke up this morning and our Rottweiler, Bella, was drooling and had a horribly distended stomach. She would not get up off the bed. Two hours later, she was put to sleep at the vet’s office.

She had what’s called “bloat”, or GDV (Gastric Dilation). According to this link, the condition can become fatal within six to twelve hours. She lasted longer, but was in pain. She was put down immediately after an x-ray confirmed the diagnosis. Surgery is available for roughly $2,000, but the risk of recurrence after surgery is so high that it wasn’t feasible.

I got the phone call and got to the vet office to pick up E and L, and she was already put down. L isn’t old enough to understand, so he alternated between being tired and whiny to dancing happily around the floor while we looked on at Bella’s body.

I’m always amazed at how, when something bad happens to a dog (or even a human), the other dogs instinctively know. The pups were visibly sad and whimpering when we came home without Bella, and the dog room looks profoundly empty without our 90 pound Rottie lazing around the beds.

Everything happened so quickly, I don’t think the full extent of the situation has hit me. It’s hard to believe she’s really gone.

I started the flooring installation on Sunday afternoon, and after doing the living room we barely had enough to complete the kitchen installation. Some of the pieces were defective, but I pieced together a Frankenstein floor with no flaws. If we could do it over again, we would have bought the best laminate we could afford, instead of settling for some of the cheaper grade.

When all was said and done, I was able to fit everything together in a way that we literally were down to two and a half pieces left over.

We did, however, learn from the living room experience, and bought a much better grade underlayment. It made a big difference in the classic laminate tapping sound, and I believe will be better in the long run.

My only real complaint is that I should have bought kneepads. It may be just that I’m not eighteen anymore, but by the time evening rolled around and I was finishing up, my knees were bright red and bruised from moving around the floor in that position for seven hours.

Last Wednesday was Mike the contractor’s last day for the week, everything was all set to begin our DIY portion of the remodel. E put a coat of Kilz primer on the walls and ceiling. We opted for the latex primer instead of oil based due to the fumes and our eleven month old, and it turned out to be a bit thinner product than we had hoped.

We then spent the first part of the weekend putting up a few base coats of flat white. It began to look like a real room.

Our next step was to level the floor to prepare for the laminate installation. There were sections where the subfloor was replaced, and other sections where the cabinets had been built into the floor. All were missing the linoleum that was under the old laminate. Since the difference in height was so striking, we opted to rip some strips of luan paneling and adhere it to the subfloor with some Liquid Nails.

Kitchen remodel progress was put on hold this week, everyone got quite sick. E got sick, L got sick, Mike got sick, the electrician got sick, and finally I got sick and wound up at the doctor. We all decided to pause on the work, rather than keep giving sickness to each other.

The end of last week showed great improvement. All the walls are up, the ceiling was patched, the cutout to the living was constructed, and by the time Friday rolled around everything had mud and tape.

Next order of business is to sand everything and replace sections of the subfloor damaged by water.

This is so exciting I have to post mid-afternoon. After two and a half years of living with a half demolished side wall, we now have a wall and ceiling.

Our contractor friend, Mike, started yesterday morning. The first order of business was to survey the state of affairs, and then start building out the little eat-in bar wall. When he took out the sheetrock, we discovered that the previous owners had chewed off the bottom two inches of the support beams, to make more headroom in the walkway between the kitchen and the family room. You can see it in the top right of this photo:

We are hoping to put a small countertop on the built out wall. Mike is going to put in a support post when the wall is built out, to prevent the beam from sagging any more than the 1/8″ it’s already begun to sag.

After spending the first day doing a lot of planning and deciding, he and E called it a day and I arrived home from work to face the evening’s task. Yes, we scraped the 1980s popcorn ceiling.

We had seen a lot of DIY jobs call for wetting the popcorn using everything from hot water to a 10:1 vinegar and water solution. None of this would work for us as the popcorn had been painted with enamel, effectively sealing it from any tampering. We decided to do it dry, and bought one of these:

Mike showed us how easily the popcorn came off with a putty knife, which gave us the idea to do a straight scrape and sand job. After scraping the bulk of the popcorn off, we went through with pole sanders and sanded down the remnants. The result was a ceiling that looked only slightly textured. We are very pleased, and the whole job including taping off the entryways with plastic sheeting took three hours.

Though we’ve been great sports about living in a state of remodel in our 1960s project ranch house, L is getting to an age where it’s become imperative that we live in a safe home. We decided to bring in a contractor to solve some of the problems outside our range of ability. Our friend’s father has been a general contractor for ages, and gave us a great and affordable quote.

The first and main project is to finish the kitchen, which I posted about here.

This first photo shows how we’ve lived for two years now, after gutting the cabinets on the first day we moved in, and discovering they were built straight into the beams of the attic (even before the sheetrock was put in). God knows how much money we’ve wasted on heating and cooling, with just plastic sheets covering the demo area. This was one of those situations where we vowed we would finish it immediately, and then got married and pregnant. Time has flown by.

More of the “before” photos:

The first task at hand was to get rid of the awful painted paneling, which used to have nasty teal scalloped fringe around the top.

The sheetrock is in decent shape, but on the left side, adhesive was used and came off tearing the sheetrock in squiggly lines. Depending on how much our contractor friend says it will cost for extra mud and tape, we are considering beadboard.

By the time midnight rolled around, we had ripped out the rest of the paneling, the upper cabinets, backsplash, and sheetrock and beams above the upper cabinets. The rest of the sheetrock was in surprisingly good condition, and already had mud and tape.

We set up our makeshift kitchen (sans sink and stove) in our front family room, using butcher’s racks, our discontinued IKEA Udden tables, and two older IKEA Varde butcher block freestanding kitchen counter units, positioned back to back.

Work starts this morning, we’re hoping for the best.

Our washing machine managed to rust out the bottom just as water started backing up into the garage even moreso than it has been. We scored a new Whirlpool washer and dryer from Craigslist for $300, and called the sewer/drainage guy recommended to us by our plumber.

He went on the side of the house and the roof, and snaked all our pipes with one of those 50-100 foot snakes with a camera on the end. The things that bubbled out of the water orifices of the house after he used the high pressure blaster were just filthy.

The conclusive findings pointed to a bad pipe job located right before the main drain stack. There is an indented section of pipe that has been collecting debris for ages, and has caused everything to drain slowly and back up over the course of the last few years. It apparently finally reached its pinnacle.

There is a ninety day warranty on the drain job, so it’s up to us to call our plumber and get that section of pipe fixed. We think our house used to be a rent house some years before we bought it, which would explain the kitchen grease poured down the kitchen sink, among other things.

We’ve spent a lot of time recently trying to get L to walk on his own. E and I have sat opposite each other and coaxed L to walk between us, which usually turned out to be a couple of hobbled steps following by a dive into our arms and lap.

This past Friday was his ten month birthday, and he decided it was time to walk without prompting. E calls him the “drunken sailor”.

For the record, those grey and orange spots on his outfit are decoration, not dirt or food. We don’t keep a dirty kiddo.

I posted awhile ago that we were getting serious about rehoming our last two found pups. After contacting several beagle rescues and striking out big time, I posted Bob on Craigslist.

Our first reply was a husband-wife team who swore that Bob was their recently lost dog (despite that we’ve had him two years, despite them living over 50 miles away). I pegged them immediately as typical craigslist freakshows/scammers, but after E called them to assure them Bob has been ours, I felt quite bad. Apparently they had a family friend take care of their beagle for a few days, and the friend dropped the beagle at the pound because their landlord complained. They never saw the pup again, and were hoping our Bob was their long lost buddy.

The next reply sounded promising, from a woman on the other side of the city who lived in a three story condo and had a cocker spaniel. We made plans to meet up at her place to see her digs and meet her son.

We should have turned around and driven away when we saw the broken window covered in cardboard with an air conditioner stuck in it. Instead, we went in. We were greeted by a slovenly woman whose boobs were hanging out of her inappropriate dress, the slovenly woman’s sister who was passed out on the couch and didn’t bother to acknowledge us after looking up, and the eighteen month old son who was dressed in apparently his Sunday best, a diaper with no clothes or shoes.

Bob sniffed around the place and met the cocker spaniel, who had bilateral conjunctivitis and an ear infection. She was confined to the yard round the clock because she “peed in the house a few times”. She had a dog crate to sleep in, covered from the elements by a piece of cardboard hanging off the side. Her food bowl was swimming with ants, and her water dish looked like one of those swimming pools that turns green from never being serviced.

The treatment a currently owned dog is receiving is obviously a great indicator of the treatment a new dog will receive, so we ran away screaming, and talked in the car about possibly calling the SPCA on her. The woman never once even pet Bob, he seemed like a potential new accessory for her eighteen month old, now that they are apparently bored of the cocker spaniel.

To top it off, we got in the car and had to pick fleas off Bob.

There are people who own dogs, and then there are “dog people”. This solidifies that Bob needs some dog people.