Tag: Houndstooth

The Office

Ha, just think of all the people who could land here because they’ve heard there might be a new season of “The Office.” I’m with you, seekers, I loved “The Office.”

Back in December of last year, here’s how the Craft Room side of the office looked.:

Now, because of the flood: the white bookcases are gone. The sofa is gone. The craft cabinet behind the sofa is gone. The two office chairs on the right are gone. The doll house on the upper left is half gone (the bottom half). The couch pillows are gone. The ottoman is gone. Of course Chaya on the ottoman is gone, but that’s because she traveled to her forever home over a year ago. The three miscreants on the sofa are still here, and that’s more important than anything else.

Currently in the same space is where we’ve temporarily set up our bedroom while the rest of the house is being fixed post-flood.

The bed and the bedside table on the left are what we could save from our bedroom furniture. We lost the dresser and the armoire. The couch on the right is the one that was in our living room and will go back there. The table on the right with the Tiffany-style lamp is a new one Debby bought for herself then decided she didn’t want so she gave it to Tom. His shoes in a bin on the top of a cardboard box are a Jack deterrent. (Jack loves shoes.) Anime is on the bed. You can’t see her, but Delta has made a pillow fort from my pillows. It’s cold in Houston, and Delta is over it.

Then and Now in the living room

One problem with finding before photos is that they’re all on my old computer which is (a) a geezer barely hanging on so I don’t turn it on and (b) in storage because I will eventually pull all the photos off its hard drive before it dies.

However, here is a wall in the living room when I was still putting books in the bookcases after we moved to the Hall in 2015:

And this is now post-flood.

Happy New Year

While I sit here eating my black-eyed peas and turnip greens as part of my New Year’s Day meal, I’m going to start sharing photos of Houndstooth Hall as it was before and is now. Because in the coming weeks as things start to be put right again, it’ll be fun for me to see what goes back to the way it was and what gets even better. =)

This is how one corner of the library was before the flood:

This is how it looks now:

Tiny Christmas

We didn’t totally ignore Christmas. There were stockings and little things (gift cards are small!). And it wouldn’t be Christmas if I didn’t receive a doll. This new Cleo De Nile from Tom is the only one in the house. Even my little action figure Edward who was left behind is now safely in storage with the other action figures. Cleo has no idea she has a whole family who will descend on her in a few months.

The base of my mother’s china cabinet the Monsters used to hang out on was ruined in the flood, but we saved the upper half. Once we can replace our furniture, we’ll find a new lower half.

Not sure if the dolls will go there again. I’ve been looking for better options, because these kids can sure attract the dust, and cleaning them takes a lot of time. We’ll see.

it’s the most wonderful time of the year

I believe I shared that Tom and I have moved our bed into half of my old office. And therein lies the reason for the only festive thing we’ve accomplished this season. Hanging remnants from last year’s wrapping paper on the French doors so Pollock can’t come stare at us while we sleep. He sends the Bat Pack into a barking frenzy, even though they all like Pollock. I guess they, like us, don’t feel like being a zoo or museum exhibit.

One in three

Only one in three dogs* can sleep peacefully on stripes against 1970s linoleum in a room still waiting to be recovered after flood damage almost four months later. They liked the laminate that used to cover this linoleum. Soon it will be GONE and replaced by tile.

Related: Keith the Contractor agrees with me that the faux-alligator (or is it crocodile?) wallpaper must stay. The first time I saw it, I figured we’d be pulling it off the wall. But it sort of grew on me.

*The Bad Dog. He dreams of eating alligators. Or crocodiles.

Providing clarity

I guess I’ve been unclear about what is going on with Houndstooth Hall and its residents, so I’ll paraphrase and add to some some answers I gave on Instagram.

We were only out of our house the first couple of weeks after the flood (that is when we stayed at Lynne’s with our dogs and Tim’s dogs). During that time, demo was done on the floors and walls, all our ruined furniture and appliances were put on the curb, and what we saved was put in storage. We have kept most of what was salvageable of our furniture in our house (Debby and Tim lost basically everything; we were not as badly flooded in the house). Dehumidifiers ran constantly in the house and apartments, and everything was sprayed with various products to reduce any chance of or eliminate any mold. We also had to have some repairs done to our gas line. We were busy during that time dealing with the paperwork and bureaucracy resulting from all the property and our two cars being flooded. Both cars have since been replaced. Debby’s truck was unaffected because it was higher up than our cars.

Tom, Debby, and I have been living in the house since mid-September on plywood floors, with no sheetrock or insulation on all the lower walls in the house. We did have to leave again for five days when the fence was replaced because the dogs couldn’t go outside, so we stayed at Lynne’s again.

Tim was living remotely–for the first week, where he was housesitting when the flood came, because his clients couldn’t fly back into the city. His car was not affected because that area didn’t flood. Then for several weeks he and his dogs lived in a house provided by a generous rescue group volunteer which she was getting ready to put on the market. Then Pixie and Penny came to be with us for another couple of weeks while Tim and Pollock stayed at the Secret Unicorn Sanctuary. But he’s been back in Fox Den for a while, and Debby will hopefully be able to move into Fairy Cottage with her dogs this weekend.

Completely unrelated and prior to the flood, Lynne put her house on the market and it sold a couple of months after the flood. So she and her dogs have been staying with us until she moves into their next residence after Christmas.

Since it took our contractors about three months to repair the apartments, you can guess how long it may take before our house is completed–they will start on that next week, we hope. At that point, Tom, our dogs, and I will be living mostly in one half of what pre-flood was my home office with all our surviving furniture in the other half while in the rest of the house: our insulation and drywall is replaced, then new subflooring and flooring, then wood trim and doors replaced and painted, then the lower kitchen cabinets pulled and replaced and painted. Then we will be back in the other rooms of the house while the office is repaired and new subfloor and floor put down there.

So we have basically always resided here, it just isn’t very pretty with plywood floors and exposed walls, and we lost a lot of furniture and personal things. But we didn’t lose the house, and we didn’t have to be out of it for very long. The dogs LOVE having missing lower walls, as they have many secret passages into and out of rooms. As bad as it looks and as strange as it is to have most of our belongings in storage, at least we’ve been home.

It will be a home undecorated at Christmas, and that is fine.