Fast Eddie is living the dream

A room of his own.

For context, my sewing (and other) workroom has been closed to him since a few disastrous early experiments. Especially, all wool is His Precious and I have a baker's rack full of fabric. Yarn fills half of a large bookshelf. He was obsessive about climbing, burrowing and chewing it all; several times, he tried to pull pieces out from the very bottom of a pile on the top shelf, causing a cascade of cat and fabric to the floor. I'm surprised he didn't hurt himself badly. No work ever got done unless he was evicted and letting him be in there unattended was out of the question. The door needed to be closed 24/7/365.

It was originally an old sleeping porch, now fully enclosed. (The house dates from 1884 and we got it for cheap on the old HUD program. The various things we've found over the years have ranged from hilarious to downright puzzling.) Anyway, once enclosed, it became an oversized walk-in closet that can get to over 100 degrees in the summer if the door is closed, once you get the iron and the various lights going. Not really usable for half the year. Even in the winter, it's gotten to be quite a mess and I've frankly been avoiding it.

Well, I've had the week off and decided to clean the ever-loving crap out of it. Furniture was rearranged to take up less floorspace. Room was made for my new serger. The folded ironing board has a place well out of the way, instead of being set up all the time. The baker's rack is still accessible, but I arranged the fabrics by weight, not fiber, so the wool isn't all in the same place.

A wing chair that held patterns and pieces of the current project, books and magazines, fabric for the next planned projects, things that needed to be mended, boxes of machine parts, patterns and such, has been cleaned off. The fabric for the next two projects is on a decorative towel rod that I put on the inside of the door. (I admit, the mending still drapes across the top back. I'm hoping to sew something, mend something, sew, mend, etc.) The chair sits next to the window; when the window and door are both open, it's really not too bad in there.

Eddie has moved right in. It's his room now. He'll come out for meals, but his upstairs water dish and litter pan are both an easy stroll from the door. The window opens on the back yard, with squirrels and birds galore, and no noisy trucks. (I swear he still remembers the parking lot he came out of as a small kitten. Nothing gets him airborne and headed to a hiding place faster than trucks.) And, oddly, Radar the elderly dog is less tolerant of change than Eddie the once-feral cat. Radar looked in once, looked up at me ("Aw, Hell, naw.&quot , and headed for familiar territory. Hasn't been back since.

Eddie's new sleeping place is on the upholstered chair under the window. I hope he'll let me use it sometimes. DH swears he won't be surprised if he looks in some evening and sees Eddie in a smoking jacket.

I've never seen him this happy.