Kitchen of horrors

Remember the last shot of the kitchen? Yes, lets hope you haven't eaten anything within 30 minutes of seeing this picture again:

You're lucky this photo isn't scratch-n-sniff. Take it from me, I've been there, and it's bad -- in a dry heave-y way.

Onwards and upwards, right?

Another beauty shot of the kitchen showing off it's fly tape and impeccable organization. Everything a modern family could possibly want. HA.

We decided to put on our big boy and big girl pants and bring the kitchen down (note to self: buy bigger big pants):

There was a noticeable decrease in the number of winged friends buzzing in drunken dirty kitchen swarms once we started to take the cupboards down.

(Small pause here: The two older guys who were frolicking through our yard-o-crap took these cupboards. I hope they took them far, far away. Crazy old guys nonetheless.)

Once the cast iron sink was taken out (and our spines readjusted) we discovered the mouse hotel under the lower cabinets and up into the wall.

EVICTION NOTICE! Well, not quite as dramatic as that, but we were glad to see that no one was home at the time. The mouse hotel was engineered using insulation and plastic bread bags.

Excuse me for a moment while I get a little sidetracked:

THESE PEOPLE CLEARLY WERE NEVER ON THE ATKINS DIET. The sheer volume of bread, tortillas, wraps, pitas, buns, flatbread that we're discovering must have cost a small fortune. We have 3 FULL SIZE freezers left behind, and every single one of them is full of bread. Two of them are outside, and one is down in the basement. When you wander around the yard you stumble across plastic bread bags and those plastic ties used to close them. I mowed the lawn (whole other story there, if I go off on another tangent this post will never end) and mowed up 3 bread bags hidden in tall grass and weeds. It makes the mower sound like a category 3 hurricane.

Sidetracking over (for now, you're lucky).

To add to the mouse hotel, we noticed an ant inn (trying to make a theme work here):

And I now know where the inspiration for Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' came from. The resemblance is uncanny:

I think my face did the exact same thing at that moment.

Then we noticed the shoddy electrical work:

Yup, that's duck tape. Doubt THAT meets code. Good thing we had already decided to bring down all of the drywall in the house anyways.

So that leaves us with a parting shot of the scene we're uncovering. Another ant party was found in the far corner, but we couldn't find any ant inns around there. That might mean there's another problem on the second level. Hopefully not, but if there is, we'll deal with it -- and I'm going to buy a 36-ton pack of caulk and cover the exterior of the house in it.