INFESTATION!! and a project

So one day I was downstairs doing the laundry and I heard strange noise coming from our walls, they were definitely noises of the creature variety! I wasn't sure if they were mice or birds, is one really better than the other when they are living in your walls - uh no!! I also didn't stick around to find out which, so after running from the laundry room screaming and finally recovering from my heart attack, I decided to go back into the laundry room and listen more carefully to determine exactly what we were dealing with. So I ventured back in with Grace for protection! After listening for a while, I determined we were dealing with birds and what's worse it sounded like several inside the walls, or more accurately the dryer vent. I called Larren and told him the good news, he tried for several days to hear them at various times but never heard a peep! Which was quite strange because I heard peeps, scratching and full on wing flapping going on in there!! I repeatedly assured him I wasn't crazy and finally a few days later he heard the ruckus first hand. By this point I was hearing it in the bathrooms too, because there were nests in both the dryer vent and the exhaust vents from the bathrooms. Seriously unbelievable. So Larren went outside and took the covers off the dryer vents and sure enough you could see nesting material. He was just home from work on his lunch hour at that time so removal would have to wait. So that afternoon I googled "removing birds from dryer vent," to my surprise there were like a zillion hits! Evidently this is not that unusual. The metal clothes hanger seemed like our best bet so Larren took on the challenge! I felt only slightly bad for the poor birds, I am sure they were so pleased with the snugly warm spot they had found - but no thank you, not in my vents, so they were evicted! Larren then installed bird proof vent covers, to keep them from returning! I tell you there is never a dull moment with home ownership!

Here is what we saw when he took off the vent cover, the previous covers were just some little slats, they seemed too small for anything to fit through but apparently not, really amazing that the birds were able to get in, but they did!

Larren on the ladder with the wire hanger, I was really relieved that no little bird eggs came out with all of that nesting material, all the girls were in the backyard with us, we would have had tears for sure if we had eggs, but none whatsoever, thank heavens!

Can you believe this! There was so much nesting stuff, it was incredible, no wonder my clothes were taking forever to dry. And talk about heebie geebies watching Larren remove all that junk was a little gross me out situation! YUCK with a capital YUCK!!

Fool proof! I hope anyway, these covers were $10 each, best $20 ever spent as evidenced by the bird dropping already on the cover, looks like they tried to return home and found out they were unwelcome! Infestation over and done with, what a week!

The girls building a sandcastle in their sandbox. They play so well together and just love being outside. This castle however, was no small feat, they spent most of their time trying to fend off their little brother. He was like Godzilla traipsing through anything they had finished smashing it all, so when they were successful at having this much standing, they wanted me to photograph it quick!

The same week of the birds, Larren built a new picnic table for the backyard. Two years ago he built a big 8ft. picnic table and it has been so fantastic when we have had BBQ's in the summer. But I also wanted some sort of child size table for all the kids too. So this little project actually began with that umbrella I got at work for $5.00. We had this little umbrella from Pottery Barn kicking around at work but the table never came in that goes with it, so after it being there for months, I bought it and thought, "now Larren can build a kid picnic table to go with this." He loves and I mean really LOVES how I buy one little thing usually really cheap and then come up with this whole other usually expensive project built around it! Not that I do this often of course! :) So Larren being Larren of course says he'll figure something out, well all the plans he found online were for toddler size tables and I wanted more of a child size that the bigger kids could sit at too. Of course that's what I would want, so no plans worked as designed so Larren had to come up with it from scratch, he kept having Savannah come over and sit at it and measure how to make it work, I did feel a little bad that it ended up being so complicated and took so much time! But isn't it great! It's fabulous and will be awesome this summer! So thanks to Larren for putting up with my crazy projects and ideas, my mom got one for Mother's Day for her backyard too! It was much easier to make the second time since he had figured out all the measurements, but how fun for me and my mom to have these tables in our backyards for summer! Now if summer will just show up - that would be great! Oh and Larren needn't worry either I have a few other cheap finds hiding in the garage just waiting for me to spring on him - of course they'll require a project to become exactly what I have in mind! :)