My new barn. Happy face.........lol. I love to build things but I have to be cheap about it. This cattle panel/pallet/tin barn fits the bill. I spent 140 on new tin, I like new tin, it doesn't leak and that matters. I spent 20 on cattle panels because I bought the messed up ones from the co-op, hallelujah for discounted cattle panels. Pallets are free of course and I used some wood I had laying around along with free osb board that comes with the pallets. Ignore my mess, I'm working on the a fence as we speak. Like always I am terrible at taking pictures of the process. I get caught up in working and before you know it, I'm done and haven't took pictures. Poop. Here's the very beginning, I did get a picture of that. You will need to make 4 of these, 2 for each end. Use 3 inch screws and good luck, pallet wood is hard! After you make 4 pallet corners you place them where you want the corners of your barn to be, keep in mind how long your tin is.....You can't make it longer than your tin!! My tin is 12 foot but you could do 16 or 20. I would imagine you would need another cattle panel support in the middle if you op for that. Lay a cattle panel across 2 corners and wire the ends down. It would be easy with 2 people but is doable by yourself. The wood blocks is where I screwed through the tin and into the wood to make it secure. Once you have your cattle panels rainbowed over the corners add tin. It's that easy. Once again I wish I would have a took a picture of every step but it's pretty straight forward. Since I am using my barn as a bunny barn I will be covering the "triangle" areas with osb board and I will leaving the pallets where air can blow through. The idea is block the suns rays and still let the cool breeze blow in. Below are extra pictures of what I use this barn for. I use a old pre-fab chicken coop (from the dump) for my rabbit mommas to have babies in, I figure they deserve the extra space. I make my own hay feeders from left over wire, it's super easy and free considering I would be throwing the scraps away anyhow. I cut a hole in the side of my barn so dogs can sleep in there with out me leaving the door open.
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So me and Tom went out huntin' for projects for tonight. We walked all over the yard and gathered up some old wood and hardware cloth. I bought some lace and burlap from walmart and decided to make this cute cross. As always I didn't think to take a before of the wood.........poo.........so here's the final product. I'm sure you get the just of it. Dr. Pepper for size reference, lol. I made another one :) I cut up some pallets, added a dash of green paint and a coat of coconut oil.
I have a small house so I have to use my space efficiently. I really like vintage dishes and dishes with crazy patterns. I used to try and cram them all on this tiny shelf I had...............Then I had a idea! I'll just pull off the cabinet doors and decorate where I store my dishes I actually use! These are the top 2 shelves, I can't reach them so I put all the dishes I don't use up here. They are for display only. The next 2 shelves down are my glasses and then I have a blank-ish spot, I just rearranged and now I can have more dishes :) These are the two shelves that I use most. I put my seasonings in cute shakers so they can be displayed and useful at the same time. My very favorite thing is bowls. I love rainbow bowls.........
I'm cheap. Once upon a time I liked to grill, A LOT but then I could grill no longer because I'm broke and I can't be spending a lot of money on charcoal................. So I came up with a way to spend NOTHING on grilling. Why didn't I think of it earlier? STICKS! I just walk around the yard and pick up sticks. Two birds one stone. Clean yard, good food. I'm gonna do a recommendation here. These steaks are the best thing I have ever tasted in my entire life, I'm pretty sure it's the tiny package of powdered happiness they send for you to season them with, YUM YUM YUM. They are a Christmas present from Victor and very appreciated. I'm gonna do another recommendation.......... :) These are WONDERFUL too. Tonight is gonna be a delicious night. You can get them from Walmart even tho Walmart sucks. Once your sticks get coal-ish looking your ready to go. I use leaves or pine straw to start my fire. I like my steak bloody, a common mistake people make when cooking a rare steak is putting it on a cool spot on the grill. I like my steak chard so I sit it directly on top on a small flame. Close the lid and go get the rolls out of the oven. When you come back that side will have nice lines, flip. Depending on the thickness of your steak it's probably done now. See how it has chard parts (crunchy) and pink (juicy) middle, YUM. I have to go now............
While in walmart today I spotted the Christmas trees. I always get a real tree, I used to go cut one down out of the woods but after the prickly Christmas tree, I won't do that again. I wasn't planning on getting one this soon and didn't have a bunch of money but they had short trees for $22. That sounds good to me! I bought a tiny box of miniature ornaments, 2 strands of colorful lights and ball hooks. I got the bead strands (they are awesome and vintage!) from the flea market for 50 cents each, I decorated my tree for about $10. I like saving money.......My husband says I'm a "crotch-e-dee" old woman because I will refuse to buy things I need because the price is too high. I will wait it out........I will find it at a garage sale........one day.......lol. Tom refused to give us any balls, he lines them up, just like everything else he gets a hold of. I love my kids. Some times I like to put them to bed early so I can keep loving them instead of yelling at them and making them cry. After all the joy of Christmas treeing and pizza, tonight quickly turned into one of those nights. SO the kids are in bed and I am enjoying some couch time. When I put the kids to bed early Madison always asks "What time is it?" and I reply...."bedtime"............lol. Merry Pre-Christmas, Everyone!!
Some people like to say "Do it right the first time". Well that ain't how I do it cause I ain't been doing it long enough to know what I'm doing. So that being said this is what my breeding pens looked like about 30 minutes ago. I have 6 smallish breeding pens and believe it or not, they have a roof.......a tin roof. Tin that was old and full of nail holes, I saw the holes when I put it up but I thought "Aww, that aint gonna be a big deal" cause I'm stupid. So it has rained and rained and rained and everyday it got worse and worse. Now I blame the chickens for the puddles, they dug'em to dust and now they have small ponds in their pens. Either way I don't want'em wet and cold so I called my husband at the co-op and told him to bring home 2 bales of hay. It's just a quick fix but it will get them dry for now. This is my first winter with chickens, I hope we make it! The rain can't stop us.......
When I got into chicken keeping I read all the chicken books, stayed up every night on the internet, researching, planning, I even laid in bed thinking of what my coop would look like. I shoved every piece of valuable chicken information that I could find into my head, feather patterns, shank color, rose comb, AHH it was overwhelming but one thing stuck I WANTED BLUE LACED RED WYANDOTTES. Now I get excited about things and tend to jump the gun. Tractor supply only had chicks for a few days when I decided I was ready (I was NOT ready, I didn't even have a coop!) for chicks. I was up at the church where my mother-n-law works and a man named Bobby works there also. Bobby has chickens. So naturally I love Bobby and want to talk to Bobby because he wants to talk about chickens and no one else I know does. He told me about the chicks at tractor supply and told me about brooder lights and so on. I decided I would go "look" at the chicks. Don't look at the chicks. You can never just look at the chicks. I left there with 10 chicks that day (3 cuckoo marans, 3 buff orpingtons and 4 random pullets) and 6 ducks...........I NEVER EVEN WANTED DUCKS!! I had never thought about ducks......I actually made it all the way to the check out counter with just the chickens and then told the clerk to go ahead and ring up 6 ducks. Either way I was the proud new owner of 16 birds, a heat lamp, some chick food and pine shavings. Baby chicks and ducks are tiny, there is no reason I can't house these babies in my daughters room for 6 weeks. Right? My coop would be done in 6 weeks and they would have a home. LOL..... I used a old metal cabinet turned over on it's back, like a big metal box. I clipped the heat lamp to the side pointing down, added their food bowl and waterer. I moved all my daughters furniture to one side of the room, oh my gosh she was so excited, she held the babies, she loved the babies. Life was good, we were farmers. I loved them and she loved them. Madison (my daughter) was more responsible than ever with her new chicks. I woke up one morning and she had already changed their water and was cleaning out their box, I didn't even have to ask! Then it happened, overnight, they went from cute fuzzy butts to nasty, nasty, NASTY. Now I just assumed that they were all nasty (chickens and ducks) I have never raised either one and really didn't know anything. I had to remove ALL the pine shavings EVERYDAY, the whole box would be smelly and full of poopy, sludgy, waterery pine shavings. Every time I gave them new water they dumped it out. Chicks fly sooner than you think and ducks grow faster than you think. I went to check on them one day and there is POOP. EVERYWHERE. In my daughters room.......POOP. EVERYWHERE. One chicken, one super pooper chicken decided she could fly and did......all over....everywhere......for the whole night. So I decided they had to be separated, the ducks where too big and the chicks could fly. I needed a taller home for the chicks so I bought a stock tank at the co-op and put it in my daughters room beside the duck container. Now by this point I was ready for them to go outside but it was still below freezing at night and it was not a option, the coop wasn't done and there was no where else for the time being. I then learned that chickens are not nasty, they are dusty.......they make dust and they bath in it and they throw it up into the air and it lands everywhere. Ducks are nasty and smelly, chickens are dusty. So now I have nasty smelly ducks, dusty flying pooping chickens, all in my daughters room. I'm just waiting on child services to show up at this point. And that was just the first 3 weeks. Check back in later for "The rest of the story". Goodnight ya'll |
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