Eye candy DIY-ish houses

October 9, 2022 12:46 PM

A house with a whole lot of colorful cat infrastructure. Memphis/pomo.

A completely black-and-white doodled house, with videos. I find it kind of vertiginous.

A natural-hues indoors wall of climbing space for the cats and !! racoons !!.

A house densely stencilled and plastered in high Arts-and-Crafts style, by the artisan who lived there. Now a museum.

This is less DIY, maybe there's some links, but I'm really amused by a House Beautiful article on goblincore.

posted by clew (23 comments total)

That makes dusting a labor of Hercules.
posted by y2karl at 12:53 PM on October 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

That makes dusting a labor of Hercules.

They have 5 roombas.
posted by aniola at 1:04 PM on October 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

I want to live in the house with the 15 cats. Also, I need a shark tunnel/door I can scratch my back on. I'm sure it works better than a wall corner.
posted by kathrynm at 1:38 PM on October 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

They have 5 roombas.

And they get the roombas off the floor and onto the catwalks, across the cat bridges and through the shark mouth how?

I mean you do dust above the floor at your house, do you not?
posted by y2karl at 2:04 PM on October 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

Collaboration with Boston Dynamics? (I see your point.)
posted by aniola at 2:09 PM on October 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Honestly, dusting the catwalks seems like it would be faster and easier than dusting a house with a lot of clutter. And if they've got the litterboxes in closets that ventilate to the outdoors and roombas running all the time, the dust build-up won't be as bad as it could be.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 2:19 PM on October 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Sad to say the original The Cats' House in San Diego was sold, and the new owner removed the catwalk.
posted by phliar at 2:45 PM on October 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

A house with a whole lot of colorful cat infrastructure. Memphis/pomo yt .
A natural-hues indoors wall of climbing space for the cats and !! racoons !! yt .

These two really put the "meow" in "homeowner".
posted by Daily Alice at 3:57 PM on October 9, 2022 [20 favorites]

A natural-hues indoors wall of climbing space for the cats and !! racoons !! yt .

I sure hope that works out but cats and raccoons together is a combination I can never endorse. I have seen how it didn't for a cat.
posted by y2karl at 4:21 PM on October 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

I mean you do dust above the floor at your house, do you not?

Someone brought their judging face. Dude, I don't even dust the floor. I don't need a roomba, I need a housedozer.
posted by maxwelton at 6:41 PM on October 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

My cat-sized dog sheds and it is great!

Their fur sheds and generates these little tumbleweeds of dog fur that collect dust and debris as they find their ways into corners. I then find these balls of tumbleweed + debris and promptly throw them away. We are a barefoot household and my dog's tumbleweeds have actually cut down on sweeping time.
posted by aniola at 7:46 PM on October 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

A Swifferdoodle I presume?
posted by y2karl at 8:13 PM on October 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

I read about The Cat's House decades ago, and I'm glad to be reminded and see it's still doing well.

That was how I found out about museum/earthquake wax-- twist on, twist off no residue stuff that makes it possible to have fine knick knacks and cats at the same time.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 3:01 AM on October 10, 2022

The cat house is getting all the attention, but the David Parr residence is beautiful.

It's the opposite of the cobbler's children having no shoes - a skilled craftsmen who was able to take the time to apply those skills to his own family's residence.

It's nice to see that level of decoration in a modest home, even if I'm a white walls person myself.
posted by jellywerker at 4:26 AM on October 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

In folk art homes: the Maud Lewis House
posted by eviemath at 6:20 AM on October 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

If they are paying $40-50,000 for a single catwalk, I figure they are paying someone else to dust the house.

Also, it's 100% none of my business, but I was a bit distracted wondering what the deal was with these three adult men apparently living together. Are they a gay throuple?
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 8:51 AM on October 10, 2022

I absolutely love this thruple and the fact that their relationship is the less interesting thing about them!
posted by latkes at 9:59 AM on October 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

I biked through ag country once. The part of California that's been drained of its wetlands and dedicated to endless "fields" and "orchard" monocrops. The kind where you can sing "endless grapes" in chorus to the tune of "baby shark" for an absurdly long time, just until the end of this "vineyard" here.

Anyway, we biked through an ag town deep in the heart of ag country. It was not uncommon for the trees in the yards to be heavily pruned in the style of commercial orchard trees. The David Parr house reminded me of those trees.
posted by aniola at 10:15 AM on October 10, 2022

I sure hope that works out but cats and raccoons together is a combination I can never endorse.

I don't follow the channel closely anymore, but as I recall the raccoons he keeps are hand-reared rescues and I don't believe the raccoons or the cats are allowed to occupy the same accessible space together without close supervision. The raccoons have their own enclosure that they spend most of their unsupervised time in.
posted by Aleyn at 3:17 PM on October 10, 2022

My mom grew up on a farm just outside of in Beverly Kansas, then and ever population 300, in the Depression. Her oldest brother Frederick, who I met 60 odd years ago -- and only heard called just plain Boy by the rest of his family and Uncle Boy when addressed by me -- lived his whole life on the property. Who I met 60 odd years ago. He kept a raccoon in a large cage with a chick wire bottom just outside his house. The raccoon would drop bits of what it was fed on the grass and gravel below the cage and when one of the chickens on the property happened to wander underneath to peck at it, it would reach down through the chicken wire and wring its neck. They are murderous as cats or Jack Russells if not more in my experience.
posted by y2karl at 4:29 PM on October 11, 2022

Maybe being kept in a cage with a chicken wire bottom tends to make one a bit more irritable than one might otherwise be, no matter one’s species, though?
posted by eviemath at 4:32 PM on October 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

There is that. I must also admit I am the type to tear up watching those sappy animal friendship gifs and videos on the Dodo or LAD International. All the same raccoons can be scary. I walked around a building corner one time and startled one and it arched its back like a cat and puffed up to big as a Samoyed. Yikes! said I..
posted by y2karl at 4:41 PM on October 11, 2022

Also, Trigger Warning: Harrowing Raccoon Story You Will Never Forget. And it gets worse and worse long before it ever gets better so be forewarned.

Michelle ...The two of us are now holding this raccoon, which is still hissing and snarling and clawing. And my husband, he says, I'm going to get a tire iron out of the car and try hitting it and to kill it. So he goes and gets this tire iron out of the car. And he starts to hit it, and he figures he'll hit it once or twice and he'll kill it. Well, he starts hitting it, and he probably hit it between 15 and 20 times. And it's still snarling and clawing.

So then I said to my son's girlfriend, Olga, I said, Olga. I said, go to the house, and get a knife. And in the meantime, my son takes the tire iron, and my son starts beating on the raccoon. So for at least five minutes, they're taking turns beating this raccoon. And about at the point where Olga is coming back and gets out of the car with these two big knives, the raccoon had died.

from Act One, The Hills Have Eyes. (transcript) in This American Life's And The Call Was Coming from Within the Basement.*

*Today I Remembered -- the neologistic acronym of tir I now provisionally claim for my self and my heirs -- or learned for the time, whatever, that it was a Halloween show!.So, Season's Greetings! already.
posted by y2karl at 5:29 PM on October 11, 2022