Fitz Update

The work week has started and Fitz is doing great so far.  Sunday night was rough, he slept from 7-10 pm and then didnt’ sleep a wink all night, which kept us up as he paced around the bedroom, licked himself and shook himself (collar jingles).  He whined a few times, we walked him (just in case) but he was just awake.

So Monday we changed it up as best we could.  I got a few hints from friends and here is what we learned about Fitzwilliam:

  • – Chicken broth (just a little) mixed with his dog food means he’ll eat it when we feed him instead of hours later – yeah – he’s eating on a schedule now!
  • – Plain chicken cut up is tempting enough to work on training with him- we’re working on ‘come’ and he’s definitely learning
  • – He does play with his toys now – he will throw around his rope bone and a stuffed animal I gave him for 20 minutes straight if he’s in the mood.  He’s not into the tennis ball and only chewed the kong once for a minute.  He won’t ‘fetch’ but he’ll run and get something I throw and go chew it happily.  If I go to take it he instantly leaves it for me, he’s very submissive.  Tonight i will buy him a few more toys to see what he likes.
  • – A piece of cheese in the kennel and he goes in no problem, he seems to be okay in there for 8 hours straight, just sleeping probably.  And he was just fine when i got home.  So we’ll keep this up for the week and then look into a dog walker for after our vacation when his kennel stays will be closer to 10 hours (I have to leave work at 2 in order to keep it down to 8 hours)!
  • – If we work on keeping him more awake in the evening (when he wants to sleep) he will sleep from 10-12 or so (which allows us to at least fall asleep).
  • – If we open up the rest of the upstairs for him to wander in at night and take his collar off he doesn’t whine and he just wanders which is quiet enough to let us sleep.
  • – He can definitely go all day and all night without having to go out, he was in no rush at 6am to even go.  He doesn’t like the wet ground as much and it’s a rainy week 🙂

So we are learning and he’s being such a good boy.  He’s definitely got a lot more personality now and is testing his boundaries, trying to get into things etc.  I finally had to dog proof some of the rooms he has free range in and he seems happy.  He gets lots of praise and petting and still loves to follow us around.  He’s not happy when we’re in different rooms or on different floors, he has to check on both of us constantly 🙂

And two benefits:

  • – The exercise!  I am going to get in great shape with this routine!  We do some sprints every morning (I like to get him exercised a bit before a day in the kennel).  And walks in the evening.  If the weather is nice we do long walks (3 walks this past weekend alone).
  • – The extra time in the day!  Contrary to previous habits, I actually enjoy getting up at 6am (if I can get to bed by 10:30 and actually sleep at night).  My day is so much longer and I get so much more done.  I’m also a morning person so I’m more productive when I get in to work at 8 rather than 10 🙂

Painting

Yesterday I got a coat of paint on the trim, today I sanded that coat lightly then painted the walls.

Door trim and walls with one coat of paint
Walls have one coat
Almost done!

I’ll get the second coat on the trim tonight probably and the final coat on the walls tomorrow night if I can.  We bought the gym floor mats we wanted today, 3 4×6′ mats.  We’ll probably end up with a 4th, maybe 3’x6′ once we see how much of the floor these cover.  The gym is almost done!

Mr. Fitz tired me right out today, after painting I could tell he was tired of laying around while I painted (he followed me around continuously while I cleaned today).  So we went for a nice long walk which is a lot of work on my end since he’s not trained at all, he pulls and he tries to mark EVERYTHING.  I’m going to look up some training classes now 🙂

Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy

Fitz for short. He’s a 4 yr old lab mix.  Not sure what he’s mixed with but he has some red hair in his coat and some white spots on his feet.  His original name was Nacho but he was a stray and the name was new so we changed it.

Fitzwilliams

On Saturday we decided to go over to the humane society just to see what dogs they had and put in an application in case a dog came in that matched what we were looking for.  Never having been before we had no idea what the process was.  We walked in and saw 3 dogs that we loved immediately.  After asking questions about temperament and how they were with other dogs, this guy sounded perfect.

He’s great with other dogs, very submissive so he’s even good with dominant dogs.  He’s great with people and children, just friendly if not a bit timid.  He’s very comfortable when you kneel down instead of stand over him though.  He knows absolutely NO commands at all but seems to be pretty house broken.  We’ve caught him lifting his leg twice in the house but both times caught him before he marked, and got him outside.  He’s doing very well.

The only problem is we’ve made no headway with any type of start on training.  He doesn’t seem to like food or treats or toys that much.  I did figure out he likes cheese so we used that to get him in his kennel for a quick trip to home depot.  Since we have to work tomorrow I wanted him to have some short stays in the kennel today and he seemed fine in it (probably used to it).

He was understandably nervous yesterday but finally last night a little personality started coming out (he likes human food and since he doesn’t know ‘No’ yet we have to watch him when we have food out.  We’re looking into taking a class with him, especially since I only know how to train with treats.

We’ve taken him on some long walks and a jog or two already and he seems okay with that, not great at night with cars going by, headlights and cars seem to make him nervous.  He’s such a good boy, he hasn’t barked, growled or whined yet, no noise at all.  He doesn’t know his name or anything like come, sit, stay.  We have some work to do.

Anyway, he’s hanging out with his Daddy right now while I paint the gym and Ryan works.  He’ll get another kennel practice later when we go out for another errand.

He really likes his new bed

Last weekend

While I was down in NYC last weekend, Ryan was home and he made some great progress on the gym.  He added the shoe molding to the baseboard since the floors were done, did the final coat of paint on the baseboard and primed the trim around the door!

Door trim all primed
Baseboards finished!

Just the door trim to paint and the final coats on the walls.  And of course the door 🙂  That’s still being stripped.

Deliveries

Today was full of deliveries.  Ryan was very excited that his new 58″ plasma TV arrived safely and he’ll have it to watch basketball all weekend while I’m away.

new tv

I was excited that our fan for the gym arrived.  We got a 52″ fan.  The only downside was that it came with a control module and a remote instead of using a regular control.  We had planned on using the Maestro control we purchased which included a fan module.  So after pulling out the fan and taking a look I decided to try unhooking the wireless control module they had and replacing it with ours.

A couple hours later and it worked!  I was very surprised this worked, I was sure I’d be plugging it all back in as best I could (I did jot some notes down).  So the fan is in and the fancy switch we like works!

Gym fan installed!
Maestro Fan/Light dimmer switch - and it works!

Considering I didn’t get home from work until 8pm and didn’t start fussing with the fan till 9, it’s not too bad that it’s midnight and I”m just now getting back to fixing our internet (router was reset) and heading to bed.  All in a days work.  Off to NYC this weekend with my cousin Hannah to see Wicked!  First up a stop to see my sister – and there will be pictures!!!

Front Hallway electric done

A quick sand and a second coat and the gym floor was done for the day this morning.  Still a tinted coat, the third coat will be a clear coat.

Second coat finished!
The gym floor with 2 coats!

Once the floor was done we dove back into the electrical.  Now that we had daylight it wasn’t difficult to go into the attic to wire the upstairs hallway lights.  A few hours later and we had both the stairway lights (sconces) and the upstairs light wired to their own 3-way switches.  Lights lights everywhere.

New switch at the bottom of the stairs
Switches at the top of the stairs
Switch by our bedroom door

After dad headed home I did cleanup.  I’m surprised by how much we got done this weekend.  Poor ryan is getting the cold I had last week so it’s going to be a quiet evening.  Maybe some sewing if I’m not too tired to do anything but read 🙂

Floors and more…

What a LONG day – we’re just now sitting down after a 14 hour day (of course we had breaks for lunch and dinner but not long)!  And the progress we made shows what a day we had.

First up – the gym floor!!!  Dad spent the morning sanding it down and we did a bonus section of the hallway outside the gym (leading into the kitchen).  By lunch it was ready to coat (so we headed to home depot to get some stained poly).

First pass with the belt sander
I helped with the vacuuming between sanding passes
This is the bonus section we decided to do, first we had to take up the linoleum in layers
Scraping up the felt stuff from the edges so dad can run the edge sander
Final time around the gym edge
A look at what the oak would look like with a clear coat (using mineral spirits)

At this point we broke for lunch and for a trip to pick up some poly and a paint brush.  Before I show the finished floors I’ll show what Ryan did this morning.

While dad worked on the gym (with some help from me), Ryan got an early start putting up the window trim in the tv room…

Just getting started.
First window finished
Finishing up the second just in time for a lunch break (and a home depot run)
And the windows are trimmed out!

And back from lunch, we decided to try mixing a tinted poly (minwax) with a clear poly (to thin it out a bit).  We didn’t like the oak with a clear coat and wanted a darker floor.  Here’s our new gym floor!

look at that color!
And 20 minutes later (or thereabout) the floor is finished! (Well coat #1 anyway)

While Dad did the poly, Ryan and I installed the outside lights finally.

Before...
And the lights are up!
Check out those front lights, now if only they had some electricity...

So while at lunch we decided we needed to plan another project for the afternoon since the floors only needed another 20 minutes.  We decided to work on the upstairs closet, not realizing what we were in for!

Hours later, we basically just got some wiring done – and undone.  First Ryan took out the baseboards and then I took out the insulation from the ceiling (that was a messy job!).  Then we took a look at the mess of wiring and tried to figure how much we could remove and leave the rest of the non-closet lights working.

Finally, we re-routed the original wires so all the upstairs lights still worked.  We also put in a closet light with a switch.

Closet light!

Then we dealt with having no electricity downstairs (in the front hall and livingroom).  We decided to actually wire the front hall off the planned feed that was run.  The livingroom which was tied to the hall light is temporarily staying on there but now the switches in the front hall all work!

Outside fan, porch lights and hallway light 3-way all wired!
New coat closet light wired up

The only lights we don’t have hooked up yet is the upstairs hallway light and sconce lighting on the stairs because we need to run some wires upstairs in a new run.  Just doing what we did took hours.  So no real closet progress was made but the electrical is in good shape!

That was a very long day.  Tomorrow the second coat will go on the gym floor!  Time to rest up!

 

On the mend

Well the cold hit hard but fast and I seem to be doing much better now.  I’ve learned from past experience that the cough that persists can be cleared up with my Advaire Rx if I start it once my cold subsides and it’s been helping again.  So I’m ready for the weekend (well after I get all my work done for today that is – got quite a back load from this week) 🙂

In other ‘mending’ news I did manage a little sewing.  I finally finished the second panel for my sister’s curtains!  2 more panels to go!

tab top curtains for window 1

And rather than start right on the next pair I decided to pull out the fun fabrics and get a start on the wall hanging.  There’s applique involved so I wanted to make sure to start early enough on this.  I got the rail blocks done (only 3) and I cut the matching strips for the crip quilt which is going to need 3 or so more fabrics before it can be pieced.  I also had to draw a monkey for applique because there isn’t one in the wall hanging, the zebra is going to be replaced.  You can see a picture of the wallhanging and crib quilt here along with my monkey and my blocks.

Wallhanging start for my nephew

This weekend we’re doing the floor in they gym!  I am So excited.  That room will be done very soon now!

Gym Ceiling is done

Monday night I could tell I was getting sick so as I usually do when that happens, I take some meds and try to squeeze in one last “chore” before I’m out for the count.  Since Ryan had to work late I made myself a pizza and then did the final coat on the Gym ceiling.  This was really just cutting in and then rolling the one corner we had patched.  The rest of the ceiling didn’t need a third (or fourth) coat 🙂

I ended the night by working on stripping the Gym door some more.  I’m just about finished with one side.  I figured since my neck hurt from looking up, I’d do the stripping which usually hurts my neck from looking down 🙂

Unfortunately taking Nyquil did not help me sleep at all, I was up most of the night, congested and with a headache (severe cold).  Around 5am I took some mucinex D which helped a lot and I was able to get a couple of hours of sleep.

I haven’t managed much more today than to watch a movie (Princess and the Frog finally).  Looking at the computer is not good on my eyes when I have a headache but I figured I should check some emails and make sure I wasn’t missing anything important.

I’m heading over to the store to get some juice since I haven’t felt up to eating much and need some vitamins.  I sure hope this cold passes quickly, I have a few more things I’d like to work on around the house this week.