First, here’s a beautiful lady, saying hello!

Tissue is quite enjoying the warmth of the sun – and so far, none of the cats seems to have tried to destroy the smaller plants that have been temporarily moved onto the shelves that will soon be holding seedlings.

Soon, she will not be able to spend time on the window sill in this room! My daughter and I finally made it to the city to pick up what we need to make the cat barriers (which my other daughter is paying for, sweetheart that she is!).

And I’m looking forward to having a carpet that doesn’t get completely covered in cat hair and the bits of rope torn off their scratch tower, immediately after vacuuming.

We’ve got three sizes of boards. We were going through the cheap contractor grade pieces, and it was hard to find any that weren’t damaged, or wonky.

We also got chicken wire, aka: hex wire, instead of the hardware cloth I wanted to get. It was the only thing they had that was wide enough and long enough for this.

We’re actually doing a simplified version of our original plans. Instead of a box frame for the entry, then a door frame inside, and finally the door, we’re just going to do a box frame and a wide door.

For the box frame, we’ve got 1″ x 4″ boards. The frame is meant to slide into the entry into the living room, with self adhesive foam on the sides to hold it in place, but still allow us to remove it, if necessary. The problem was, we couldn’t find the thickness we needed. There is moulding at the top and bottom of the entry, so the foam was supposed to fill that gap. After debating our options, we decided to go with the thickest they had, and we’ll remove the molding from the bottom of the entry and make the box fit top to bottom more snugly. It won’t be completely snug; when the girls measured the space, they found a half inch difference between the top and the bottom!

For the door, we’ve got 1″ x 3″ boards. We will also need to create a barrier for an opening in one of the shelf dividers, so we got 1″ x 2″ boards as well – one of which will also be used a side jamb.

We spent some time looking at our latch options and ended up going with a simple hook and eye latch. We decided against getting a handle. We had use the latches as handles, but if we really wanted a handle, I’m sure we’ve got something lying around the house somewhere.

Unfortunately, it does look like the hinges I picked up will be too wide. Possibly. If we do have to get smaller ones, I’ll be sure to pick up three hinges, not a set of two.

Securing the chicken wire was another thing we had to consider. We’d both bounced around the idea of sandwiching the wire between boards, but we’d basically double the wood need for the door, so we’re going to make it the same was as the barriers we’ve made for the basement doors; The horizontal boards will overlay the verticals, with the wire sandwiched between, and the rest of the wire will be secured with something else.

My thought had been to use small U nails (I think some places all them staples), but they didn’t have any small ones. The alternative is to use actual staples, but our staple gun isn’t very strong, and we’ve found the staples pop out way too easily. So we looked at staple guns, only to find that ours was there, and is a heavy duty gun. So we ended up getting stronger staples, instead! We’ll see if that works. If it doesn’t, I know where to go in town, where I can get what I was originally thinking of, in bulk.

I might need to go into town, anyhow. I think what we have at home is all too large for the size of wood we are using. The cats have knocked most of the boxes off the counter in the sun room, anyhow, along with all sorts of other things now scattered around the floor in there – and we won’t be able to clean it up until we can take things like the table saw and my husband’s walker, outside, so we can get at it all.

Meanwhile, construction starts tomorrow. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get both the doorway and the shelf opening done, and we can finally have cat free space for more seedling trays, and not worry about them being destroyed! And hang the shop lights we will be using as grow lights from the ceiling without worrying about cats jumping on top of them. We have seeds that need to be started indoors 12 weeks before last frost, and that’s in four days.

In other things, I got an email from my bank this morning, congratulating me on getting approved for the low limit credit card I applied for (and approved for) last week, and letting me know it just got mailed. I was also informed that I could start using it right away – if I just get the Apple Pay app and set it up through my online banking.

No, thankyou!

For the card I chose, there is no annual fee, however there is also a 21 day interest free grace period on new purchases. As long as I pay off any and all new purchases within 21 days, and never use cash back, I could theoretically never pay interest on this card. Since I plan to only use it for purchases within budget, and pay it off right away, that should actually work out.

On another unrelated note…

One of the things we got done today was set up an eye exam appointment for my younger daughter. I was going to wait until my husband and I got our tax returns, and we’d get glasses for all four of us (which we planned to do last year, but ended up with unexpected bills, instead). Unfortunately, my daughter’s glasses have gotten so scratched up, she can actually see better without them than with! I’d been told that in our current province, eye exams are covered by the provincial health care plan, once every two years. When I called and asked about it, however, it turns out that it’s only partially covered – and the remainder that we would pay is $105. !!! I hate to think how much it would cost if it wasn’t partially covered! That is massively more expensive since we last got our eye exams. At least I’m still covered 90% by my husband’s health insurance, and I confirmed that they direct bill.

We just have to get our taxes done. I picked up different software than the TurboTax we usually use and did try to get it started, but quickly gave up. I had to manually include the T4A to their list of different T4s (I had no idea there were so many), but while I could input how much he paid in taxes, there was no line for his disability income. The line number on his T4A simply doesn’t seem to exist in the software, which makes no sense at all. There was also nowhere I could input that I qualify for the caregiver’s tax benefit, nor anywhere for my husband to include that he gets the disability tax credit.

It takes a lot to be even worse than TurboTax.

Frustrating.

Ah, well. It’ll get done, and the sooner the better!

The Re-Farmer