Tent

I made Simone a tent for her birthday, here's the one photo I took of it:



All in all, it looks pretty good. Mary gave me the link that showed me how to do it.

White Car Is White, the photo

The roof was nearly red from rust. I'll get to the sides/front/back later this year.

White Car Is White

Yah, the Mazda got a paint job.

I sanded and sanded and sanded and sanded the roof of the car to get rid of the rust. Then I taped up the windows with some help from Simone. And then came the cans of spray paint - two coats of primer and three coats of white with a few minutes between each coat.

Now it's white. ish

Simone was very proud of how the car was going to look. She said that everyone at work would be surprised how shiny it was, which is true.

Murphy

Mary spent the day with some friends, so Simone had me to herself. We watched a little March Madness (I don't think she was so crazy about the basketball, but she liked the mascots), cleaned the bathrooms, made some rolls, drank hot chocolate, and had a good time all around.

Yesterday, we all went to the hardware store and picked up some shelving pieces. I had planned on installing it while Mary was gone. Murphy stuck hand into things twice, and the project is not yet complete.

The first was my fault of not double checking the orientation of the support bar, and so I cut it on the wrong side. It's not a big deal, it just limits the 2nd set of shelves to have a little less clearance than I'd planned, and I have to now make a 2nd cut with the hacksaw.

The second was the kicker. My 2nd battery for the cordless drill died. No juice means no screwing in the support bar, means no shelves.

bummer...

Sigh...

It's the Sunday before Christmas, the sun is shining, it's warm, there's blue sky.

And I'm about to climb into the attic to try to figure out why the bathroom fan is dripping water.

wheee....

Mental Note

Ensure you have the right spare tube when you go riding.

I went on a mountain bike ride with Mary tonight, and got my first flat in a couple of years. No problem, I whip out my spare tube and my pump... the tube has a stem that's too short.

Huh? Well, if you recall, I got a fancy rear wheel to replace the other fancy rear wheel that I got because I've had problems with rear wheels in general. Anyway, the rim has a deep-V cross section, so you need a stem that's long enough to poke out. Turns out, my spare wasn't long enough. I had actually thought of this situation and bought a valve extender, only it was at home in my toolkit.

I could have taken the tube off my front wheel and used it, but at this point I decided I was only 3 miles out and I could just jog back. So I did.

I'm still trying to figure out how I got a pinch flat with my fancy full suspension. Unfortunately, I can't blame it on big air...

Oh deer...

I stand up from the couch, look outside, and a 6-point buck looks back at me.

WTF?!?! He's eating the leaves off my Van cherry tree!

Now I have deer netting around the tree, looks ghetto, but I gotta save the tree.

Did I Mention?

We got 14 yards of chips?

And we spread them around the new beds - that each have a working water spigot.

Pretty nifty, eh?

Chickens In The Coop!

So many things to give an update about. But the chickens are in the coop.

I can't believe it's been nearly three months since the last update. Progress was slow and spurty - I get stuff done, but not very quickly. That also happens to be my stock answer when I (occasionally) get asked if I ever want to be a chef.

Wow, looking back, the last time I posted there wasn't even a floor on the coop. So that's the next thing I did.

The coop floor. Note it's one piece of plywood, cut out around the vertical supports.

Simone is checking out the detail put into the linoleum floor, one piece - no seams.

Here you can see the nest box, and some of the diagonal bracing (helped with rigidity).

Simone striking a pose, amidst the roof bracing.

Simone doing some chin-ups.

Simone peeking through the egg door, she's not sure she'll fit through.

Mom and dad came down to help one day - we did the hanging screen door on the east side.

Hanging out of the feed door.

The egg door, not quite hanging flush.

Side door into the coop.

Houston, we have roof.

The only piece of the coop that is recycled - an apple branch for the roost. Also notice the aluminum threshold (for easy cleaning - covering all the seams.

The other end of the roost.

Simone thinks the storage would make a great play house.

"Let me out!" The chickens are outgrowing their temporary housing.

Dolly says, egg door works fine for me.

This way Dad!

Screen door is on.

Fine attention to detail - a bead of caulk to help when we wash out the coop with a hose.

Caulked seams and threshold.

The whole package. The whole east side is mesh for ventilation.

Simone thinks the latch isn't quite right.

Much better now that she's tightened it up.

All west doors are in place.

Singles are on, only one real aesthetic mistake - can you spot it? Also notice the ventilation gap just under the eaves.

A better view of the ventilation gap, and the flashing on the roof.

The northern doors are on, the egg door and the main utility door are hung and latched.

Mary seals the inside of the coop.

I think she's considering moving in.

The storage area gets a coat of primer.

The coop in it's final resting place, all painted.

Why not yet another picture?

I'm not sure what Simone is doing, but it involves the drill.

Rays from the sun, the coop is done. The chicken door is on, and the ramp is attached.

Of course, it turns out the chickens don't like walking down the screen. They can walk up it just fine because their three toes clamp on very easily. However, going down, they're very uneasy having just one toe(?) keeping them from sliding down the ramp. I will add more cross pieces and move the screen to the bottom (to keep them from falling through).

The chickens check out their new home.

As usual, they just peck at everything.

Coop update

I spent a little bit of time working on the coop again this weekend. It doesn't look that different, but there are a lot of small changes. The roof beams are now cut to the proper length (they were about 3 inches too long), the 2nd floor now has horizontal beams, and there are a number of triangular supports providing stability.

Jupiter lookin gout the north end, pretending he's in the nestbox.

Jupiter is startled he didn't lay an egg. Or maybe he's afraid the chickens saw him scoping out their pad.

We don't need a stinking truck! Just throw it on top of the Subaru! That's 8 sheets of 3/8" plywood.

Simone isn't so sure Jupiter belongs in the coop.

Chickens

We got some chickens.

"What?" you say.

"Yeah, chickens."

I mean, Who doesn't like eggs? No, we're not going to eat the chickens - I mean they're gonna have names and everything. I certainly am not looking forward to telling Simone that "Gladys" went to the big coop in the sky.

So we got some chickens, 3 in fact. I believe the breed is "Buf Orphington." Mary actually picked up 11, eight were for a friend who couldn't make it to the store the day the chicks arrived.

Mary has been wanting chickens for quite a while - I never fully understood the attraction, but now that we have them, I'm getting pretty stoked. We'll get eggs, probably over a dozen a week once they get going (next year, they'll reach laying age right when winter starts to set in and egg production drops). And they'll turn all our kitchen scraps into nice fertilizer. Plus we'll get some friendly pets to follow us around the yard.

Currently, they're living in a big Tupperware bin, eating, drinking, sleeping, cheeping. They're a hoot (guess that'd make them owls). Simone loves to say "hi" to the chicks.

Longer term, they'll obviously grow out of the Tupperware bin, heck at this rate they'll probably be too large for the bin in another two or three weeks. In the first two weeks they've at least tripled in size. They've transformed from cute little fuzzy balls into mangy-looking small chickens. Why are they mangy looking? Their feathers are coming in, and the initial feathers aren't completely full - they kind of look like what you would get when putting a pinata together.

So what do chickens live in? A coop of course! Where do you get a coop? You can buy them... Or you can make them.

Being the handyman I am, we chose the decision to make one.

There are all sorts of different variations, but none quite fit what we wanted, namely bigger than small, with storage underneath for the bags of food and bedding.

Perhaps at some point I'll put up the plans (it was disappointing to see the lack of detailed plans available on the web). But the basic plan is a 3'x5' base, the bottom vertical 3 feet is storage, and above that is a floor for the chickens. We bought a linoleum remnant and are putting that down to ease cleanup after the chickens.

Here are some pictures of progress so far, Simone helped quite a bit.

The base and the initial frames for the walls. The whole thing will sit on those cinder blocks you see on the right.

Simone sitting in the framing for the storage door. She's making sure everything is square.

Simone is verifying all the screws have the same number of threads, and the threads all go in the same direction (nice to be sure which direction to turn the screwdriver).
Finally you can see the overall framework, including the roof line. I'll be trimming the the vertical and roof beams appropriately this coming weekend.

And here are the chickens:
This is all 11, ours are the yellow ones. See how small they are compared to the feeder?

At age 3 days (well, one week? dunno, this is three days after we got them).

And here they are after two weeks at home, notice they're about the same size as the feeder now. They let you scratch their chest now if you're real gentle.