We have some guests coming to stay with us tonight. They are the same people we were travelling with in Italy and they’ve also helped us with some of the work on the house during the first clean up weekend. Although the house wouldn’t have to be spotless for them, I still want it to look nice. So I have been cleaning some things up around here and I was taking the wine bottles which we bought in Italy down to the cellar. They have been sitting in the living room and didn’t get around to moving them the rest of the way. Actually, I think the intention was to take them to the new wine cellar already but since we haven’t been to the house since we got back, that would be a bit difficult.
So they are in 3 cardboard boxes and since we’ve gotten home, Ayla hasn’t tried to devour the boxes any further which was almost a miracle in itself. Most people who have Newfs also have found that they are just “drawn” to cardboard like they are to water.
I took the boxes down to the cellar which is a room we rarely go in. The water heater is also located in this room and it has a special heater that pulls the heat out of the air and somehow converts that to heat the water for the house. The problem with this heater is that it also pulls the moisture out of the air and deposits it in a large container via a little plastic hose. I guess the container holds about 30 or 40 gallons of water and weighs about a ton when you have to empty it. Unfortunately, even after living here for over a year, we still forget to empty these things regularly. We have yet to figure out just how long they take to fill up and so on.
So I get downstairs and notice there is some water on the floor. Ayla noticed it too and while I was getting some towels to soak it up, she decided it would be a good time to play in the water. Since she had also just come in from outside, her paws were caked with dry, very dark soil and of course she redecorated the floor with her footprints on the cream colored tile. I can say I am extremely thankful she stayed downstairs and didn’t go up to the carpet in the living room…but I was again not amused. She has already been rather wild this morning and I already need to clean both leather sofas and the chair in the living room because they are covered in dark mud from her antics today. So then I got to add on cleaning up the floor downstairs.
Naturally, trying to use towels to clean it up (or anything else really) with Ayla around is next to impossible. So I sent her upstairs, closed the baby gate behind her and went to the clean up. Just as I was finishing up and coming back upstairs, I heard her in the kitchen with something. So I walk in there and she’s gotten the carton of coffee creamer off the counter and is licking the contents off the floor. Let me again state that I was not amused.
Although I know that there will be new issues to deal with in the new house and probably more problems at time, at least we will not need to worry about the water containers overflowing anymore since we don’t have a water heater like this in the new house…and I also won’t have to worry as much about Ayla tracking in tons of mud and dirt because she has very little access to any in the courtyard. February 1st just won’t come soon enough lol.
