A Curious Visitor

Happy Monday friends!  We hope your week has started off well so far.

Norris House has been nothing if not full of surprises.  On Friday, our surprises were of the critter variety.  See if you notice anything unusual in this shot of the first floor ceiling:

If you've not found him yet, look for the tell tale striped tail and a little grey foot lazily dangling down up there in the corner.  All prior visitors to Norris House have been focused on specific jobs.  Our first leisure visitor was a juvenile raccoon.

It was daytime so he was pretty drowsy.  No indication he was ill or ailing in any way - we think he just availed himself of entry via one of those gaping holes we discussed in an earlier blog post.  This morning he was nowhere to be found so perhaps our friend has moved on!  If he returns, we'll deploy a humane trap and get him relocated to a more suitable environment.  We won't kill him, and we won't let him linger due to a risk of getting trapped inside.  As cute as he is, he just can't stay inside Norris House.

Mind The Gap

Sometimes it's difficult to effectively the scope of work ongoing to bring Norris House back to life.  We think pictures like this one say it all:

This gives new meaning to that British pleasantry "Mind the Gap."  The masons working on Norris House are serious contenders for MVP with all the stabilizing repairs they've made so far.  Gaps like this appear at intervals on both the north and south elevations, but are getting shored up as we go.  We are so excited to see some the framing go up front and back that it's easy to overlook the progress on the less dramatic things like this.  Let's agree to not think about the critters that might find it irresistible to explore our basement with these new entry points...