Pet Resistant

I forgot about something that happened last week that I just HAD to post about on here.  It is a "house project" type of thing so it feels like I'm getting back to my original blogging roots! Well, those would really be studying abroad but that's not happening in the forseeable future.  Anyway, last week the same night I was splattering tomato juice and seeds all over the kitchen, we had the patio door opened to get some air moving through the house since we have turned off our air conditioner but it still gets pretty warm in the house during the day.  The light was on out there which attracted lots of bugs and, as I was slicing and squeezing tomatoes I heard the sound of Allan attacking the screen as he has many times.  But it sounded more drastic than usual and I panicked when I saw a huge hole the size of a softball ripped in the screen which he had put his paw through and used to slide open the screen in his bug chasing frenzy.  I ran over to the door and grabbed him with tomato covered hands and left a gross red and seed filled handprint on the wall with my other hand.  It all happened so fast...

So we were left with a huge hole in our screen.  Now, in Allan's defense, the previous owners of this house had a small dog who also apparently had a penchant for screen clawing because it had many small holes at dog level.  Yes, Allan has made some of them worse as have the kids who can't seem to resist sticking their fingers through the holes.  But this was the final straw...we had to replace the screen. 



Here you can kind of see the hole-y condition of the old screen.

There is the big one at the bottom...

I have a very vague memory of watching someone, probably my dad, replace a screen so I knew some could be replaced by pulling a long black cord out from around the window frame but I feel like having a torn screen is always a big deal when it happens. 

Well, Justin headed to the hardware store and purchased some new "pet resistant" screen and a new cord and we did a pretty decent job of replacing it.

Well, he did the hard part.  I just pulled the screen tight.  It looks a lot better.  It is one of those things where you have to thing, "why didn't we just do that a long time ago?"