Cats and Bathrooms, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Picking Locks

Oh yea, the other floor plans

So, here's the floor plan for the second floor. It's not the final thing either. Probably the biggest impact change of any was to get rid of the wall and put the cable rail in its place alongside the office. We still can't imagine living in the house with that wall there - it would have been so closed off. Even if our office was a bedroom, we'd still have the cable rail instead of a double-walled hallway. And the master bath - the toilet and shower swapped places as soon as we saw how it would frame up - and we wouldn't have it any other way. These clearly aren't the final plans, because I'm also noticing that this doesn't reflect the proper placement of the sliding doors to the deck off the master bedroom. As designed, the bedroom door would open and block the light from and access to the sliding doors. Even before we tore down the old place, we made the change to shift the doors to the deck to the far side of that wall, so there's no obstruction. I've got to imagine they've addressed this in future designs as well.















This weekend has been filled with postable events, most of which probably are interesting only to us.

Mirror-Mirror
The search for mirrors for the guest and half baths had been consuming us for weeks. Like our own version of Groundhog Day, we returned to the same stores, naively believing that they would have something worthwhile this time. Yesterday, in blazing afternoon heat, we trekked through Harvard Square down Mass Ave to look for something serviceable, figuring stores catering to students would have something. After a disappointing round, we stopped for a beer and a salad (very, very good) at Henrietta's Table at the Charles Hotel, and on a dare, stopped back into Crate and Barrel. Well, we found mirrors that would work fine - not our first choice by any means, but better than serviceable.

So, the catch? Oh, these are the last 4 in the country, they've been discontinued and we don't know whether we'll be able to sell them, and they're part of a "design" and our designer isn't here to okay removing them from the display. Well, it turns out if you look like you might cry, people can change their minds pretty quickly - and slap on the 10% floor sample discount. Yippee and three cheers for a store manager with her head on straight!

If this hadn't worked out, we probably would've found ourselves schlepping to Ikea again, and we know how much fun it was to get lost going there the last time!

So, about that locked door

Well, someone other than me (who shall remain nameless) decided he had enough of a hungry cat and tossed her into the guest bath and slammed the door shut. Of course, the little pin lock on the other side had been pressed in somewhere along the way, resulting in a cat locked in a bathroom. This is, of course, on the second floor and has no operable windows. A panicked call to the builder on a Sunday afternoon for tips on breaking in didn't really work out (he has a life...). My entreaties to call the fire department (don't they rescue kittens from trees?) was not agreed to. So, out comes the tool box, and eventually we found an Allen wrench in my bike tools that was just the right size to wiggle into the little hole and pop the pin to the unlocked position.

Someone has litter box duty for the next month as penance for this little misdeed. In the meantime, I'm researching how to disable the locking function on all interior doors before something really bad happens. Why do people want locks on interior doors anyway?