Day 254- My house, my Menagarie

Plastic update- We finally went through all the left over water from the hurricane and are starting to move to more grill cooking. This past weekend we went to home depot and managed a plastic free purchase. This can be done by buying cement board and 2x6s. Now that I think of it; building is a bit like cooking. If you cook or build from scratch, it's pretty easy to be plastic free. If you buy all prefab stuff, then you get lots 'o plastic. Words of wisdom right there.


In other exciting news; I found a snake in the basement. Yes, boys and girls, a snake. A black rat snake to be exact, which works well with killing the mice; not so well with me not freaking out.

Image from wiki, thank goodness

When the previous owners got read to sell the house, they had it painted with kilz in creamy white. We've found some old colors, and this was probably a good idea. On the downside, whoever they hired had apartment painter syndrome; which means it was just sprayed everywhere. Walls, windows, light switches, electrical sockets, that hardwood floors and the bathtub. Hubbs and I spent a week scrubbing hardwood floors to remove paint, and I'm just now getting to replacing the painted over electrical sockets. 

Normally, I'll replace one or two a day, just to make sure I'm not screwing up electrical. This requires that I go to the basement, turn off all power to the house and then commence working on sockets. Today when I went down there, I heard this sliding, rustling sound. At first, I thought it was the floor joists creaking because Hubbs was upstairs hanging curtains. But then I realized it was ALIVE and if I poked a ceiling tile, the sound would move. Of course, I ran upstairs and convinced Hubbs urgently calmly to come down and see what we had going on. You see he's tall and can reach the ceiling, whereas I would have to use a step ladder. Yes. That's my story. 

We pull down some ceiling tiles and find this:

See our snake?

Well, that's a four foot snake in our drop ceiling. Between the pipe leak, the mice and THIS we are unfinishing this basement and starting over. I'm convinced there is are voles, mice, rabbits, snakes, small children and perhaps some more cave crickets in the basement and IT FREAKS ME OUT. It's like Home Alone levels of basement anxiety. After some quick googling to make sure that we wouldn't die if the snake bit us (not that we wanted to be bitten), we convinced the snake to leave with a rake and a gentle nudge to the door. 

Snake V Rake

Yep, you should leave

He didn't get far enough away, so he was placed further away from the house

So, there is our first and hopefully last snake. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go investigate all sounds in the whole house. And there are lots of sounds.