Years ago, I found out that it is possible our house started out as a small shack just the size of our kitchen. The rumour started based on the fact that the kitchen is made of a different set of materials than the rest of the house and if you move the fridge you can see the seam where the kitchen and the rest of the house are joined. You can also see the crack in the middle of the kitchen wall where part of the place is clearly sinking into its own foundations, and I often envision the house cracking in two and going under, much like the titanic. But that's another post for another time.
I'm not sure how likely it actually is that the kitchen came first and the other rooms followed, but at the time of discovery it seemed spectacularly likely and I enjoyed telling my friends that our two-story, three-bedroom house had once been one tiny room. Off of that room grew a dining room, a living room, a full story just of bedrooms and bathrooms and closets which, years before we moved in, were chopped up and redesigned and "rennovated" to become smaller, more numerous rooms, etcetera.
Then we got hold of the place, and soon we had strange little balconies sprouting out of hallways and closets and the deck of a ship came bursting out of my bedroom wall and perched itself on the roof of the kitchen directly below it, and then suddenly we had strange stylized open porches jutting from the kitchen walls and towers growing up out of the garage and brightly coloured awnings coming off of the thing like wings, and before I knew what was happening, it was too late: the house had become a jungle-gym for all of the neighbourhood cats.
It started out with just our cats, who found that, once they were exiled out the back door so we could have a few cat-free minutes in our little castle, they could easily scale the support beam that props up the prow of the second-floor ship and yowl their way back into the house via my bedroom window, courtesy of the person trying to sleep on the other side.
We* fixed the problem by wrapping cheap Krazy Karpets around the pole so our flexible furred friends couldn't get a good enough grip on the pole to continue climbing. This was all before the additions to the garage started happening, and, for a while, we managed to keep the cats off our first floor**.
I found out today, though, that what we've done in the past few years is created an ingenious set of boardwalks that offers full roof access to any cat smart enough to figure it out. They jump from the ground to the Chevelle Malibu (parked beneath the makeshift garage in the backyard). From the car they climb a bit of fence and swing themselves onto the roof of the makeshift lean-to garage. From here they climb to the real garage, leap gracefully from the garage to the latest tower (which will theoretically become an indoor sandbox for my nephew), walk straight from the tower roof to the back porch and from there shimmy their way along the kitchen roof and onto my boat deck, where they will sit outside my bedroom window and meow.
This would all be well and good if the feat was only performed by cats who belong to me, but when the mysterious brindled cat from somewhere down the street shows up at my second-floor bedroom window to make life difficult for me, things get rather confused.
*and by that I mean, my father
**except for when I was kind enough to let them out so they could balance on the edges of the boat deck railing, convincing me that they'd plunge to their dooms at any minute and I'd be left well and truly catless.
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