Orbs 'r' Us

SOME OF MY JILL ABILITIES.... and I have been training PoD to use hers!

When PoD & Trebor moved to Dodge they bought Wilma and Puffy Kracker's old house. This one of the oldest homes in Dodge but in good structural shape with a large backyard for her kids to be safe in.

One late August evening in 2004 PoD had expressed the possibility of having two rooms upstairs for the kids bedrooms.

As it was the kids slept downstairs in separate rooms and PoD & Trebor slept upstairs, which consisted of 1 bedroom, an exposed toilet/sink, a double closet and all was accessed by an open stairwell with a rickety rail surrounding it. All of those things were not great for two active and curious kids.

Still fresh from her "Intruder Nightmare" she wanted sleep on the main floor and be able to hear any noise so she could protect her kids when Trebor is not home!

I used to be a set designer/builder for our theatre group and figured if I could do that why not for real in PoD's place.

So I came up with a brilliant idea that involved our splitting up the main bedroom into two rooms with platform beds accessed by stairs that housed storage space, with a work/play station under the platform and outside of their rooms I would create a play area/TV stand by enclosing the stairwell for safety reasons. Pod also would get a place for her books, 3-D puzzles and tote container storage.

Sounds massive doesn't it...well it was!

So in early Nov., PoD and Trebor removed the toilet, sink and gutted the whole upstairs so all we had left was and empty hole that looked like this....

Our first major chore was to supply heat to both rooms. The drawback was there was only one vent but thankfully it was in the middle of the room. With some heavy thinking I came up with an idea about having the vents located under the bottom step of the kid's stairway to their platform beds. So with some measuring, cutting and fudging we ended up with something that looked like this....

We were lucky that the windows were centered in the main bedroom so each kid got their own window.

Next came the division of the room into two rooms. This included the building of the platform beds. It sounds easy to say it but it was harder to put up!

Remember...measure twice...cut once!

Here are some photos to show the progress....

Take note of some of the photos have "Orbs" in them. To those of you who think they are "dust motes"...how come there aren't millions of them because it was pretty dusty up there...that's where we did all of the sawing!

The whole time we were building I had this feeling that we were being watched and sometimes I felt these were childish like spirits! I always felt they were happy with what we were doing. It did make me feel uncomfortable at the time!

Will be sending more pictures on the building process....

Got to get to work....