Just trying to keep a roof over our heads

So, yeah. Here we see The Old Guy (TOG) sitting in a nearly-completed “florida room” on the back deck of the house. How did that happen, you ask?

Well, since the dawn of time, we’ve had dining tents or gazebos of one form or another. Each year we have to replace them. The tops rip, or the plastic deteriorates, or somebody stumbles while trying to operate the door zipper and shreds the mosquito netting.

Each year, we go out to find a new dining tent. But alas, this year, none was to be found at an affordable price. This awakened the Spirit of Carpentry in TOG, and soon he was haunting the local Lowes home improvement store. The idea was to reuse the last tent, which was 8 by 8 feet, as the cover for an 8 * 8 dining tent frame made of 1 by 2 inch furring strips.

A couple of weeks and much sweat equity later, a sturdy frame of 2*4s emerged, and screen cloth that was six feet wide by 24 feet long was wrapped around it and stapled down. The tent idea was discarded, as was the tent, when it was noted that it wouldn't fit over the frame.

A door was devised that had magnets embedded in the edge to ensure that no cats could leave the compound. At the suggestion of interested family members, rafters were added, and the entire roof area was first screened beneath them, and then the whole assembly was covered with a retractable plastic tarpaulin.

Back in the day, Dad built various features of our cottage, including putting it together out of a "prefab" delivered kit. We thought prefab meant "pretty fabulous".

Perhaps that was where the carpenty bug bit (followed closely by the black fly). At any rate, trying hard to adhere to “measure twice and cut once” and other tribal memories, TOG made a couple of errors that were mainly inconvenient, and so perhaps a better name for the unit would be “the Leaning Tower of Pizza”.

The main discrepancy is that the original dining tent flared at the bottom, out to ten feet square. So we had 100 sq. ft. to accommodate us. But by making the sides vertical (the way Dad did it, using a level), that total floor dimension shrank to 64 square feet. So the maximum occupancy sign will have to read “Four adults or four cats”. But then, if the sides had flared out at the bottom, the screen cloth wouldn’t have fit. So you see how torn The Old Guy was at times in trying to meet all the group’s needs. And how he now understands how an architect feels at a planning meeting.

Of course, the first night found the Grey Cat Who Personifies Evil up on the rafter, presumably by climbing up the screens. But that was before the top was screened in. Now he is content to lie across the path of anyone who dares to use the Catbana.

The best idea of all came about 75% of the way through the project, from J, of course.

“Why not fit it right up against the patio door, so we can leave the inside doors open and the cats can go out anytime they like and sit in the screenhouse with us?”

And that, Dear Reader, explains the batts of fiberglas insulation between the exterior wall of the house and the abutting wall of the Catbana. We may not have black flies in season but we sure have mosquitoes. As the saying goes, “Once bitten, twice shy.”