..... Is there a cat back there?

Today was the first day we actually did anything to the apartment. With help from our very sweet sister in law (well, Matt's sister in law, my.. boyfriend's..brother's..wife) we managed to paint most of the dining room/living room, and clean most of the bathroom/kitchen. The bedroom was untouched.

Before Pics

This is the living room/dining room combo. The dining area is in the corner where that separate single window is, and when you take two steps left, you're in the living room.

The kitchen. We didn't paint in the kitchen, but we cleaned. A lot. All three of us were standing on top of the counter tops and step stools --- at one point I was sitting on the top of the fridge --- to scrape gunk off the tops of these cabinets. Either 409 really is the most wonderful cleaning product on the face of this planet, or we got lucky and the grime we found wasn't actually decades old. It didn't take us too long to clean the insides, outsides, tops, and bottoms of all the cabinets.

What is left is the inside of the fridge and behind the stove. On a horror scale of 1 to 10, 1 being "I am mildly disconcerted" and 10 being "Please make sure I don't swallow my own tongue during this seizure" the inside of the fridge is a 6, and behind the stove is a 9.

When Matt pulled the stove out, my sister in law leaned over, took a peek at the carnage, and calmly stated : "Ohhh, [whoever lived here before us] had a cat." I leaned over to peek and saw what looked like a week's worth of cat kibble scattered all over the grease-stained floor. "Ahh," I replied, "yup."

To which Matt said, in a worried tone: "...Is..is there a cat back there?"

A dead cat. He thought a dead cat was back there. I am not sure why, because both his sister in law and I were calm as could be. She had said 'Oh, they had a cat,' and I had said "yup." What about this interaction meant "There is a mangled, somewhat flat carcass of a half-decomposed cat behind our stove," I do not know.

Had there been a dead cat behind our stove, my reaction would have been any of the following options:

a) I would scream bloody murder and run into the farthest room.
b) Vomit, immediately.
c) Gasp sharply, then realize I'd basically sucked in dead cat fumes, then B, then A.

I would not, in any way, say "yyyuuuup."

My hand says hi! I realized today that using a paint roller is harder and more physically exhausting than walking four 50+lb dogs at once. Thankfully Matt did most of the roller-work, and I went in after him like a small paint elf with poor upper body strength and touched up missing spaces and corners.

This is the Mystery Light. No switch in the apartment controlled it. We turned it on by tightening the bulb. Guess how we turned it off. We still don't understand...

The paint colors we used are edible-sounding. The walls are "Warm Caramel" and the trim, which we haven't started yet will be "Bittersweet Chocolate." The far wall (pictured earlier) will be the darker brown, with the caramel trim.

 

Then there was the tricky business of our bedroom door:

Yeah, it sticks.

A bigger problem, however, is how outrageously high our pilot light is (read: top of stove = BURNING HOT), and bigger still, the leaky pipe under our kitchen sink. We managed to flood the kitchen while we rinsed the stove's vent grill. It was a flood that paper towels could manage, but still! Leaky pipes? Don't you check for that before letting people in?!

Then again, there could have been a dead cat under the sink.