I finished painting the spare bedroom today.  The final coat on the ceiling was the only thing left.  Luckily, the ceiling only took one coat of paint.  The walls are so dark that they took three coats of paint to get a nice deep even luster.  Tomorrow I will be able to take the tape off the walls (I used it to keep a nice straight line from the ceiling color) and it will be done!  I still need to strip a little paint off the door trim, but I am leaning toward just using the palm sander to finish it off.  I will start emptying the room so I can lay down a coat of paint stripper around the edges of the room.  They painted the outside edges around a large central piece of linoleum.  Once I strip that paint off I can start sanding.  I am hoping to get started on sanding next week.  I am going to cut the shelves to the right length tomorrow.  Once the floor is finished I will be able to just pop the shelves in and load them up.  With all the fresh paint I won’t sand until next week to give the paint some time to cure.  I really want to make a storage/laundry closet downstairs in the laundry room.  It will go in our current unused corner, the bottom 18 inches would be a spot for all our boots.  Then four divided bins for our laundry (whites, lights, darks and delicate).  This would be 4 feet high for a total of 66 inches tall, leaving 25 inches left to the ceiling.  I can get two more 12 inch shelves above the laundry.  The whole thing can be 18 inches deep.  Since it is that deep I may even be able to shrink the laundry storage height.  I would like to squeeze in one more shelf.  I have the whole thing designed in my head.  I even know how to attach it to the walls and add a floor just off the tile. I even have most of the lumber out in the old house…

The light in the chicken coop is working.  We collected 10 eggs today and the first green one!!  Totally cool.  I have been waiting for the green eggs to start back up.  Zeke finally learned to ring the bell today consistently.  Too bad he only rings it so he can run out and eat thrown out food in the compost pile!  Damn dog is too smart for his own good. 

We had another baby lamb.  One of our first time moms (#15) had a single baby girl one day while Sarah was in the hospital.  They are both doing fine.  Annmarie bought me an animal grease pen.  We have so many babies it is hard to keep track of who belongs to whom.  So I am going to write the mother’s number on the baby’s side. 

Our child is in the hospital sick again, so we are just maintaining.  I have been coming home and taking care of the animals.  Yesterday, I got Zeke to run up a very steep hay pile and hang out 12 feet off the ground on top of the hay.  This let me throw bales off the top and not crush the puppy.  He is getting better.  I am trying to get him to understand the word “guard”.  When he watches the open door and keeps the sheep from passing I tell him he is “guard”ing the door.  Works so far.  I did mount a new chicken light to a wooden pedestal on Thursday.  It has an enclosed glass cover and then a strong metal wire basket over that.  I wired it to an extension cord directly and screwed it to the ceiling in the coop this morning.  It was working great when I got home.  Amazing how much more light there is when it comes from the ceiling.  Now hopefully, we will get more eggs.  I recounted last night and we have 29 laying hens and are only getting around 7 eggs/day.  Some of them should be old enough to lay this month.  I am going to have to get our friend Doom to make me a few more wooden eggs.  The chickens have lost two of the wooden eggs and are now currently laying in the same nest boxes.  So I would like to put 2-3 eggs in the upper boxes to get them to move into the upper boxes.  We will see if he has the time.  No new baby sheep recently.  We still have at least three more pregnant ewes.  Two of those look like they are going to pop any minute.

Well, the spare room is going to need a third coat of gold paint.  The dark color is very hard to paint on and get an even coverage.  I dug out the step ladder and went into the attic, dug around and found our back porch light.  This week I want to get the back porch light wired and the outside outlet working.  We have not had this functioning yet.  It will be a nice change to be able to turn on the porch light and actually see outside. 

I got a night vision camera for my birthday.  Just need to get it hooked up so I can start spying on the chicken predators.  Annmarie just told me there can be no streaming video to website.  We don’t have enough bandwidth to support that.  I don’t want to give up any bandwidth.

I wired a new chicken light today.  I have a metal shielded glass covered light.  The chickens will bounce right off it without breaking anything.  I wired in an extension cord so I can just plug the light right in to an outlet.  This should help with my egg production issues. 

I started some grape starts today.  One of my generous coworkers brought in a bunch of purple grape cuttings in to work and let me take them home.  I trimmed them up and put them in some soil on the breeze porch.  I have over 20 starts going.  Hopefully, I can get at least 15 of the plants to start and root.

December report:  I am positive again by $19.84 for the month on an average 27 hens laying.  My net income total is – $241.43 for the year.  I would have almost broken even if I had not spent $220 on the chicken butler automatic door.  It was an abysmal failure.  I was sent a second one for free and it didn’t work any better.  Not sturdy enough to handle the chickens and child and predators.   I had $37.16 in expenses for feed (150#) this month.  We collected a total of 226 usable eggs (decrease of 7 eggs)  averaging 7.3 eggs/day collected.  My productivity for the month was 27% (decrease of 3% from last month).  The chickens ate 0.66# food/egg (a decrease from last month of 30%).   It cost $0.16/egg or $1.92/doz for feed (a decrease of $0.48/dozen over last month).  My monthly net income is a loss of $20.15/month this year (a decreasing loss of $3.60/mos).  Chickens cost me $20 month just to have!!  I had so much predator kill this year that I had to buy two separate batches of baby chicks.  Crazy problem.  I will electrify the outside fence again in the next couple of months.  The predators always start up in the spring.  Annmarie got me a remote night vision camera that I will allow me to watch the coop 24/7.  I am going to try and get her to set it up soon and maybe even get it to stream live to our website!  Will see how it goes.  It is slowly getting better despite production dropping off. 

For the year 2011, I had an average of 24.6 laying hens.  I collected 11 eggs/day.  For a total productivity of 45% for the entire year.  The chickens consumed on average 0.71 pounds of feed/egg.  My average egg cost was $0.17 or $2.04/dozen.  I lost $20.15 /month over the whole year.  Not going to do the automatic door again next year.  May get a temporary woven electric fence.  Not sure where I am going to go with the chickens.  We did learn that 40 is the maximum number of chickens that I can have.  Here’s hoping 2012 is a better chicken year.  

I did call our insurance agent today.  We are looking into converting our insurance into a farm policy.  This would hopefully cover more outbuildings and give us some more protection when selling the animals. 

November report:  I am positive again by $13.58 for the month on an average 26.3 hens laying.  My net income total is – $261.27 for the year .  I had $46.42 in expenses for feed (200#) this month.  We collected a total of 233 usable eggs (decrease of 20 eggs)  averaging 7.8 eggs/day collected.  My productivity for the month was 30% (decrease of 6% from last month).  The chickens ate 0.86# food/egg (a decrease from last month of 15%).   It cost $0.20/egg or $2.40/doz for feed (a decrease of $0.36/dozen over last month).  My monthly net income is a loss of $23.75/month this year (a decreasing loss of $3.78/mos).  It is slowly getting better despite production dropping off.  I keep changing the light bulb in the chicken coop.  The chickens keep flying around and breaking the light bulb.  I keep changing the bulb every week.  Gonna need to fix this eventually.