Old chicken coop

Staycation 88% completed

Steve Hardin1 Comment

This week the weather has improved dramatically so the priorities have had to change a little. I wanted to get projects done that set up Mr Professional so he can come out and work alone when I am back to work. So lots of organizing, sorting and cleaning up has been happening. On Wednesday morning we sorted the sheep and pulled off the rest of the lambs. Not sure why I didn’t think of that the first time, but problem solved. We moved all the lambs but three over into the orchard pasture to hang out. I thought we only had three in with the ewes, we spotted a fourth one that evening when we were feeding, a little boy snuck past, he must have been hidden in a mass of ewes. The grass in that pasture is over eight inches tall and needs something to start eating it down so I don’t have to mow it. We want the babies close as they have a tendency to disappear due to predators. We let Zeke, our old border collie push the lambs through the yard into the orchard, he was very happy. All he did was walk up to them and lay down. He has been laying around a lot lately and has started not eating all of his meals. We are going to switch him to soft food to attempt to encourage him to eat. He is probably not going to make it through this year.

We went out to the machine shed and sorted through the piles of scrap wood we got a couple of years ago. It was leftovers we got for a steal and had it delivered right to the house which made it even a better deal. We are now starting to dig through and use the material for various projects around the house. But it was taking up space in the machine shed and we are going to make the old chicken coop the storage area. So we sorted out the junk. Sorted out the stuff we would use once for concrete forms, which are now stored outside the chicken coop and tarped, under the eaves, so we can have easy access to it when needed. We even kept the subflooring sheets and oak plywood sheets separately in the chicken coop so we can use them for the old house. The old bathroom is going to be Annmarie’s office storage room and it will get oak plywood flooring. The floors are slanted and will need to be leveled. The old kitchen, soon to be freezer room, will need to get leveled also but it will just be 3/4” subflooring and 1/2” plywood sheeting on it. We will just be sanding down the original floor like we did in our upstairs rooms in the house.

I took the time to brush the horse. She is shedding something fierce and without another horse buddy to help her groom she needs some assistance. I have brushed her twice this vacation and Sarah brushed out the dogs when she was home so everyone looks pretty good. We came into the house and took out the old TV stand. It is very heavy but Annmarie reminded us we have the shoulder furniture movers so we found those and it made moving the stand an easy thing. I moved the new chest into its spot after cleaning the floor and doing some cord management stuff to organize the electrical mess. Annmarie wants us to use a piece of plastic channel to contain all of the TV cords to make it neater. When that comes we will install it, it does look a lot nicer with the cords contained.

Mr Professional got the side by side up and running in under five minutes. This is without the battery being plugged in. Adding that large deep cycle battery under the driver’s seat was just what we needed to keep the thing going. A dead battery all the time is highly annoying.

The small stuff I ordered for the tractor came this week. The speed handle is installed! This should just come standard on every tractor, I am unsure why they don’t. There are a couple of tool racks that will hold a chain between them now mounted behind the seat on the roll bar. The chain is actually in one spot now not tied down to some random piece of the tractor. The quick hitch is now installed and I have filled the ballast box with horseshoes. So now the Kubota has pallet forks on the front and a ballast box on the back with several hundred pounds of steel in it. It feels a lot better when you are carrying something heavy on the front.

We let the new alpaca out of the orchard thinking that everyone seemed to be getting along. The old adage that fences make great neighbors is still true. By that afternoon Mad Max had the young brown one pinned to the ground and was screaming in his ear. I tried to holler at them to get them to stop but no go. I went over and encouraged him to get off of the baby and strained my right knee. He did not initially take the hint. The alpaca can be very stubborn or determined, depending on how you look at it. We watched them for a while and all seemed to be copacetic. The next morning when I went outside there was more fighting. I went out and chased away the offenders but I could only find the two new young white alpaca and only counted ten. Which meant that the young brown one was missing, but Mad Max was present but one of our other old brown alpaca was missing. I had to walk all the way down to the end of the driveway and found the poor little alpaca pinned to the ground and the older one on top grinding into him. I had to chase him off with my coffee cup as a tool, my knee still hurts so no kicking. When I got back to the now 12 alpaca I wanted to put the three babies back into the orchard with the lambs. But they kept walking away from me. So instead when I opened the gate the seven older ones bum rushed the open gate and went into the orchard. So now the new animals are outside the fence and the old grumpy men are stuck in the orchard. Mad Max is now with the young ones but he has not been any trouble since the split. So now Annmarie asked me if I verified the gender on all three new alpaca. I did not do that. So now we need to verify that we did not end up with a female as we really do not want any cria.

On Thursday we got the side by side ready to spray. I put the first 30 gallons of round up through just spraying our road and driveway down. The only bad part about roundup is it takes at least a week before you can tell something was sprayed and two weeks for it to totally die. We cleaned out the tank and Mr Professional sprayed field #5 & 5A with 2-4-D & Milestone to kill the broadleafs, the thistles are already starting to spread. Unfortunately, the flood from two years ago changed the direction of the creek and one of the tall banks is seriously undercut. We have probably already lost eight feet of hillside and may lose another eight feet. If we lose that total 16’ I will have to move the fence. There is a very large curve in the creek now. We finished cleaning up and tossing everything onto the burn pile. I will need to get that burned again in the next month.

The big push now will be to get the spray onto all of the hay fields. We need to do this as soon as possible and then once that is done we can start fixing the fence down by four corners. As soon as that fence is done then it will be repairs on the hay baler and getting all the tractors tuned up and oil changed so everything is ready for haying season. We will be getting the barns cleaned out also so we have a place to put the new good hay.

Staycation 76% completed

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We spent most of Monday getting the black walnut tree cut up into boards and a mantle. I am not yet sure what to do with the mantle but if you know someone who needs a 9 foot long, 12×20” piece of black walnut with one live edge still attached let me know. I have it stashed in the machine shed under a tarp to keep it clean. The rest of the lumber we took out to the now clean old chicken coop, stacked and stickered it, then banded it all together to help keep it flat while it dries out the last little bit. The tree had been dead for a few years already so it should not take several years. The wife and I discussed the barn lot crossing and the cost of a new culvert. It was going to be $1800-2000 for a new 3 or 4 foot diameter culvert. Annmarie pointed out that I could just make a buttresses on each side and deck the gap with railroad ties and anything would be able to drive over it. So the new plan is to make two concrete U shaped ends and then bridge the gap with railroad ties. This will be easier than trying to purchase new culvert and will have the added benefit of creating a lot of space for water should it try and flood again in our lifetime.

Mr Professional and I put up clear plastic on one of the wall openings in the back of the old chicken coop. We did this so the light could still come in. The front part of the coop is about 33 feet long so we sheeted it in plastic and then put up OSB board to sandwich the plastic between the board and the chicken wire already stretched across the windows. We sealed up two different animal access points and now nothing can get into the old chicken coop but mice. I will need to put out a lot of poison now to prevent the mice from taking up residence. One of the cats had been keeping the room clear of mice, we knew this because there was some untouched grass seed in the building. After we got the windows covered we cleaned up and were ready to move the stuff from the old house out to the chicken coop for storage purposes.

Today, before Mr Professional came out I went upstairs and stained the second side of the bathroom door. I will seal it tomorrow and then it will be ready to install. Mr Professional had told me that one of the lambs was limping last night when we fed. So this morning I went out and cut a short length of PVC pipe, I then split it in half lengthwise. Once I had it split I filed down all of the edges to make them rounded and took a roll of coban and the splint out to the barn with me when I went to let everyone out. I managed to find a boy lamb who was limping, caught him and after everyone left the barn I was able to set him on his butt and wrap up this leg and splint it with the coban and PVC. It worked well, the only real problem was it took the lamb some time to get used to it and I found another boy lamb that was limping and had a floppy front leg. So now I will need to make another splint in the morning and splint the second lamb’s leg. I have no idea where the idiots are injuring themselves.

So Mr Professional and I sat down to discuss the new plan, we calculated how much rebar we would need and we picked it up today from the scrap yard. This is the new engineer approved plan. I am going to borrow a dump trailer and pickup the 3/4minus and concrete sand myself and take it right to the job site and dump it all within arms reach of where we need it. We can get power to the bridge with three extension cords and will mix it all right there. I just need to get the Portland Cement and lime now. It needs to warm up quite a bit so the water level will drop some before we get started.

We started cleaning out the old house to get ready for the office build. This is a perfect project to work on due to the frequent rain. It took two full 16’ flat bed trips to empty the two rooms out! There was quite a bit of unused wood stored in the old house. I am thinking about moving all of the unused wood from the machine shed into the old chicken coop so that all of the wood is in one spot. We are going to tear out the entire inner wall so I can run all new electrical wire quickly and easily using the least amount of wire. Luckily, I have quite a bit of 12 g wire leftover from wiring our house so I think I already have what I need. I also have a variety of switches and outlets, all different colors and types but I am determined to use up what I have on hand before I get any new supplies.

We used the tractor to move the trailer and it is a lot easier to maneuver the trailer. We got the first load into the old chicken coop but by yesterday evening we did not want to unload the trailer so we just tossed a tarp over it and started to work on covering up the access hole in the side of the building. This hole has been uncovered since we moved here and Annmarie has wanted it covered forever. We also slapped a couple of pieces of wood at the peak and even added an extra piece as a woodpecker has decided to put a hole in the building so it can nest in the attic. The freezer room is just going to get the floor leveled and power installed for now. It is outside the office area we are building for Annmarie and is in my section of the building. The second section will be done at a later date, most likely after we get the inside bathroom remodeled. Once the walls are stripped I will get two doors ordered and three windows. But the wiring can be done while that stuff is getting ordered and shipped.

Staycation 70% complete

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Well the weekend is over and I did get some stuff done. It feels like I am not getting anything done sometimes but that really isn’t the case and I do know that. There is so much to do! I took it pretty easy on Saturday. I stained the upstairs bathroom door. I do need to get that done! This was the single reason for taking some time off, so it does need to get completed. I transplanted some of my house plants I had rooted from starts and they were ready for the soil. I hit the $1 store, now $1.25 store, and cleaned out their four inch pots. So I now have 24 new pots for houseplants. I like to give the plants out at Christmas as gifts to my staff but it takes me all year to get the plants ready. I am going to start African Violets next. I want to get about ten more plants going. I have several of the crawling cactus plants growing. I may even try a Christmas cactus replication. I have never tried to get a start going from one before.

Sarah had posted the old WW2 dog tag maker we had for sale online. Our only taker was a gentleman from the Air Museum in Pendleton. They want to recondition it and use it at their museum to make dog tags for kids. After they left I talked with Annmarie and we just donated it to the museum. On Sunday two old guys came out to pick it up. I had sworn I would not move it after wrestling it up to the second story many years ago. It was easier to get down than up and I used the tractor to lift it into the back of their pickup. So it now has a new home and the bedroom has some unused wall space!

I went out Saturday and started working on filling in the culvert in field #4b. I was able to get one side of the culvert done enough I could drive up to the top and dump soil over to the other side. As I was was stealing soil it dawned on me that I should turn this flat spot into a hay storage area! The cows will be fed up here and the hay is easier to feed if it is right there. So we will be working on this also. It just needs a simple fence to keep the cows away from the hay.

I had my lifelong dreams crushed over the weekend. I have wanted peacocks for ever since we moved out to the farm. The reason we have not gotten them is the noise but I was hopeful that I could eventually overcome this obstacle. When I went to get the alpaca there were a bunch of peacocks. I spotted 8 males and they were amazing! The alpaca owners lived right next to this spot. I happen to mention how amazing they were. It turns out they are feral and have been loose for over 50 years. They are incredibly destructive! I had no idea. After hearing many horror stories I will not be getting peacocks. A lifelong goal dropped.

On Sunday, I spent even more time on the tractor moving dirt. I even went up the road to pick rocks and dump off soil. There is one spot in the dirt road that slants severely to the downhill side and this winter when it was wet the tractor almost slid off the road several times. I took dirt down to try and level off the road some. I was able to move it a few more inches level than it was but I need about another ten inches to truly make it safe! This meant I had to load rocks into the bucket to take back to the culvert. I need to line the entrance and exit with rocks to help harden it and to keep the dirt in place. I managed to get about 20% completed and will need to keep dragging rocks back. I need a little more dirt on the far side but it can now be driven over by a vehicle and trailer. Once it all settles down I will sprinkle it with some gravel in late summer.

I did go inside and measure the bathroom closet openings and now have dimensions for the frames. I have one frame all cut and sanded. I just need to assemble it now. We are going to cover the frames with tapestry a good friend of ours left to us. The quail all over the farm now! We see them multiple times a day in our front yard and back yard. They are starting to break up into smaller groups so hopefully they will start laying eggs soon.

Need some more storage or do we?

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The plan to convert the old house into an office is taking shape quickly. One of the things I realized is that we have a lot of other stuff in the old house. It has started to collect things. To combat this they need a new home. Now I could get rid of some stuff and we will look at everything hard before moving it out to its new home. There is a lot of space in the old chicken coop, it just needs to be cleaned up. To do that I need some help as a lot of items are long and its a pretty daunting task. I have a new helper today, it’s his first day. I have started having them pack their own lunch, bring water, appropriate boots, gloves and pants. This helps set some expectations and less for me to think about, not everyone appreciates my culinary tastes. The first day is always a dance, will it work out? What name are they going to earn for the blog? Will they keep returning?

I went in and picked him up as his mother was busy working. This did get me in some hot water at home though as I was bribed with a Dutch Bros Coffee and when I got home the wife wanted to know why I did not get her one! I quickly threw my benefactor under the bus and explained that I did not go into town and get a coffee solely for myself. This seemed to mollify the lovely half.

He proceeded to pick up trash in the yard and pick up all of the loose branches and lumber laying about. I ripped the edges off of some tongue and groove boards so we can make the magnetic screens for the bathroom. I will finish cutting those soon and then work on getting them constructed so that Annmarie can get the fabric screens installed. It is the last thing we need to do in the upstairs bathroom except for the toilet paper holder and hand towel holder, both of those were ordered a month ago but have not arrived yet. While we were working and I had to dig around in the old house for a skilsaw, I realized that we needed a storage space for most of the stuff in the old house. I had visions of building a freezer room on the backside of the old house but today realized that all of our freezers can fit in the old kitchen. I just need to level the room by adjusting out the built in slant on the floor and wiring in three separate breakers.

We went out to the old chicken coop and we started to just go through all of the old wood piles. I had sorted them 12 years ago and kept too much scrap wood. I had little pieces of 1×1 feet, not sure what I was going to do with anything this small. The helper stuck with it and kept working. This is the first problem that usually pops up, they don’t work. He kept at it and the room was dirty! Lots of sawdust from the ceiling and walls and cobwebs everywhere. I was told that he may not like spiders but we have them everywhere so a little exposure was needed. We finally had to use a shovel to empty out the dirt, sawdust and mess from the floor as the push broom could not handle the volume. My helper kept surreptitiously pulling his new pants up every few minutes until he uttered the following words “I need a belt bad”, a name was born, Mr I Need a Belt Bad! We found an old stick lighter that still had fuel in it and it worked. We ended up starting a fire and burning all of the small pieces of wood.

After lunch we moved two more piles of wood, by the second pile I was wearing down and Mr I Need a Belt Bad was dragging, he was tired! This doesn’t mean anything as there was still work to be done. We moved two huge old 6×6 barn beams that were rotten. I am unsure why I kept them as they were really rotten. But they ended up on the burn pile and went up in flames nicely. We got pretty much everything cleaned up, the only thing left is the small grain room floor needs to be shoveled and swept. I also need to get some shelves to install and move some infrequently used stuff from the old house out. I think we can be done in another couple of hours.

Mr I Need a Belt Bad was so tired he was only able to carry a single piece of maple back to our house. I carried four pieces. He was super excited to get paid, he earned it and will be back next week on Saturday to tackle the yard. The rain we got today totally hampered any lawn mowing.