Construction and Destruction

We are getting some work done on our bathroom and the house is a construction zone. The boys, Apollo and Asta (BRAT Rescue), are out of their minds with nervousness and high high high anxiety. Since the bathroom is next to the bedroom, we have been keeping the boys in the kitchen so that they are as far away from the noise of the construction as possible. We have put up a baby gate so that they stay in the kitchen.

There is not much to destroy in the kitchen, but they have been doing their best to model bad Basenji behavior. The first day of construction, they jumped over the baby gate and we had to get our Super to put them back in the kitchen and put sheetrock over the doorway to keep them inside.

The second day of construction, they pulled out a bag of recycling and shredded it so it lay in strips all across the kitchen floor (see reenactment photos). Finally, on the third day we thought we had removed all that could be destroyed.

We came home to a mess. They had gotten into the cabinet where we kept some household supplies. They had shredded the light bulb box to nearly unidentifiable bits; the light bulbs were on the table, so we assume the Super came over to remove the dangerous items from the floor. We also found a half-eaten roll of blue masking tape and a bicycle tire repair kit under the counter, the glue tube open and sticky.

Help about how to keep the destruction down in the construction zone is welcomed.