Backyard chickens: building the coop

I drew up some preliminary sketches, and a few days ago Shayne and I finally made it to Lowes to pick up our lumber.  I wanted to go to the ReStore first in case they had suitable material, but we ran out of time.  So it was all new lumber...  Sorry, Earth.  At least the metal roofing is salvaged.

Today we had a coop-raising, and Shayne, my best friend's dad, and another family friend came over to help build.  I provided technical consultation and child care.  It was hard for me not to be as hands-on as I wanted...  But, not surprisingly, everything went fine without me.  :)

Here are today's pics:

Leveling the foundation using patio blocks

Adding walls!

Framing...

Building the roof

My heroes!!

Ethan had fun watching from the sidelines...

We still have to build the house part of the coop, add our metal roofing, cover the sides with hardware cloth, and paint, but at least we have a good start!

New marriage-saving device: tow-behind lawn sweeper

While we are on a tight budget in anticipation of 6 weeks without my paycheck, we couldn't resist the Craigslist ad for an Agri-Fab 46" leaf sweeper.  I may love fall, but raking a half-acre yard 2-3 times per fall is not my idea of a good time.  Shayne also tends to get extremely cranky during this chore, so there are no fun, playful leaf fights or happy romantic fall scenes in our yard...  Last year the leaves fell so late that we were raking wet leaves in the snow, and Shayne got so crabby that I vowed to hire a leaf service next year to preserve our my sanity. 

Well, here were are at "next year", but with no money to spare to hire a service.  Call me lazy, but I know that having a new baby this year, we'd never, ever get the yard raked in a timely manner.  Enter the lawn sweeper.

This nifty gadget is towed behind a lawn tractor and will sweep up grass clippings, leaves, or other yard debris.  You can supposedly dump it while still sitting on the seat of your tractor.  A new model retails for $420, but we got our lightly used one for $125.  Even if we end up paying a service for curbside pick-up (which appears to cost $45-65.  Our county discontinued free leaf pick-up the year we moved out of the city, of course.), I'll consider it money well spent. 

Playing hooky

All of my talk about making progress on the office, and what do I do instead? Go play outside. I can't help it. If the weather is good, I can't seem to stay inside, especially when there are so many outside things that need to be done too. Wednesday, I stole some wildflowers from the side of the road (phlox and Virginia waterleaf). My mother has since told me this is illegal (the didn't teach us that in criminal law...), so I won't be doing that again. Still, I now have a few patches of beautiful phlox that I hope will spread. I put the waterleaf next to the back porch, but I think there's too much sun for it there. It's very perky in the morning, but starts to droop at about 2 pm. I'll move it to the front where there's plenty of shade.

I also took it upon myself to prune some of the trees in the woods around our yard. It might seem dumb to prune the woods, but it does look much better. It'll also keep Shayne from being smacked with branches when he mows the lawn.

Yesterday, Shayne and I installed edging pavers around the side and back flower beds. It seemed like a small thing, but it looks a TON better. I'm happy!

Here is the back of the house when we moved in:

After the removal of the mint and the addition of wildflowers:

Now, with fresh mulch, edging, and more flowers:

There's only one small section by the corner of the house that looks as full as I want it, but in a few years everything will fill in, I hope. We have lots of echinacea, coreopsis, black-eyed susans, daisies, and other native wildflowers that spread, so it should be nearly self-sufficient now.

Now about the office...

Fall Cleaning

Since we got back from vacation (a real vacation! We went to the Smoky Mountains!), I've begun fall clean-up in the yard and house. I've cut back most of our perennials that are done blooming, like the daisies and echinacea, and started cleaning up the mess from our black walnut tree. It's probably the messiest tree that grows in this area. Every fall it drops its "fruit", a round green nut, which quickly become soggy and turn black. They're a pain to rake up since they're relatively heavy, and the juice from the fruit is dark brown and stains. The yearly clean-up is enough to make me consider cutting down the tree, but I'd feel so guilty removing a tree that large... I'm not even sure it's on our property, even though that's where all the nuts end up.

This afternoon I'm going to vacuum and mop, then attempt to organize the basement storage a bit. There's not too much excitement going on at the Prairie Box lately...

Garden progress

I haven't had much time this summer to work on the garden, and in the flower bed by the back porch the two varities of mint were starting to take over. I was planning on pulling it all out next year, but when I was at Meijer today all perennials were 20% off. They were only $5 to start with, so I picked up a couple Veronica, an obedient plant, a balloon flower, and an ornamental grass for $30. The Veronica is a little sad-looking, but I think it'll come back okay next spring. With all the rain we've had, it was a little waterlogged.


I didn't take a before picture, since it was just that hideous, but here's a picture of the same area last year. Just imagine it with a few more flowers and lots more scraggly mint. LOTS.

And my beautiful Meijer finds (icky mint in the background):

And an hour or so later, after much slaughter of the mint and multiple transplants...

We obviously need more mulch and some kind of border to keep the grass from taking over. The plants are a little wilted and some of them are twisted a bit, since I moved them. I think by next week they'll look better, though. It's not much, but believe me, it's a huge improvement. Now I just need to do something to hide the a/c and get rid of the bundle of coaxial cable...

A little too late?

I'm not sure why I'm even bothering to water. I think the grass has had it, don't you?

Spring has sprung

Not only has the weather been great, everything has finally come back to life. The grass turned green yesterday (weird how that happens after a few good storms), my spring bulbs are sprouting and blooming, and frogs are singing at night. This morning I got up early and started cleaning up the yard. I got all the leaves and last year's dead plants out of the flowerbeds, and rearranged a few of the bulbs that moved around on their own. I somehow ended up with tulips and daffodils in the front flowerbed, which makes no sense. Last year, we ripped out the yew bushes and had a load of dirt dumped there. Now, there are flowers there that I didn't plant. Not that I'm complaining...

If I don't go grocery shopping tonight, I'm going to try and work on the wallpaper a bit. It's hard to do anything after work lately, since I'm so tired out. New jobs are stressful, and even though it's a good kind of stress, I'm still pretty exhausted when I come home. Shayne made some good pregress on the office, and now one wall is paneling-free. He also got the furring strips off the ceiling. It pisses me off that they out up those ceiling tiles. The ceiling in the office was in near-perfect shape, and they did more harm than good by putting all those nails in it. Instead of a few cracks, now there are groups of nail holes every 12 inches. I know it could have been worse, but it was just such a pointless "improvement". I suppose I should take into consideration that every other "improvement" the PPOs made was just as pointless if not downright detrimental to the character, integrity, and function of the house... I shouldn't complain, though, since if they had done better work, I'd have a harder job ahead of me.

We have a yard! And a garage!

Even thought I haven't been posting, we've been busy doing maintenance-type stuff here at the Prairie Box. Most importantly, we finally cleaned the garage. It's been a MESS since Shayne rebuilt the roof connecting the two garages, and we finally decided to do anything about it. That took about 4 hours on Saturday. Then, Shayne put together the wonderful grill that my mom bought us as an early Christmas present (since Shayne and I both have birthdays in December, Christmas in July is becoming something of a tradition...). I'm also in the process of weeding all of the flowerbeds one last time before we put down mulch. The front bed is done, and the large back bed is nearly so. The side flowerbed that borders our neighbors fence needs lots of help. It's been taken over by evil life-sucking vines and blackberry bushes. The utility easement on the north side of our property is also in need of help, but I think that might have to wait till spring or fall, since it's way too overgrown right now to even attempt. Since it's woods, though, it doesn't look bad, but I know it should be more open and less weedy. In spite of all the work that still needs to be done, the yard looks better now than it has all year. I'm going to plan better for next summer and make sure that my projects are wrapped up enough to work on the yard more and the interior less.

I've also been plugging away at the stairway. The railing is a bitch to strip, and I'm not sure if there's a way to make it go faster. I've been using steel wool and denatured alcohol to trip off the shellac and remaining paint flakes. As with everything worth doing, it is tedious and labor intensive. But it looks so much nicer without the paint!

We are having a cookout/open house on September 16, so we are going to be busting our butts until then to get the living room totally finished. We might not have our furniture by then, but I plan on having the woodwork, walls, and floors completely done. That gives us 3 and a half weeks to buckle down and "git 'er done!"

New and improved outside pictures

We finished tearing out the shrubs and got a load of dirt and lots of mulch to fill it all in. My mom generously donated some flowers from her garden, and we now have a new flowerbed in the front.

Working Outside the Box

Today we concentrated on working outside in the yard. Shayne ripped out 2 shrubs in front, and my mom and I worked on pruning the bushes, weeding and rearranging the WAY overgrown flowerbeds, and planting a few new flowers. I don't really have any before pictures, but these in-progress pictures show a HUGE improvement.

When we started, the flowerbed by the air conditioner was completely taken over by mint. It was everywhere. Think seaweed, but on land. As we started ripping it out, we found that there were 3 different varieties, plus some chives and a lily hidden inside it. We also found this little guy, which made us happy, since we are planning on putting in a small pond in a year or so. I know he's a toad and not a frog, so we probably wouldn't see them much except at mating time, but it's still nice to know that we have amphibious critters around.

On the side of the house, we ripped out lots of coreopsis, which had really taken over. We saved only 1 patch, but I'm sure we'll get plenty back next spring. We also found some gloriosa daises and a Shasta daisy, which we separated from the coreopsis. An echinacea and an ornamental grass were also liberated. Hiding under all of the crazy plants were 8 12" patio blocks. I moved those near the water faucet, and we put the hose on them instead of in the dirt. Then we ripped out more grass and pruned the shrubs bordering our neighbor's fence. All in all, we worked for about 6 hours, so that should give you an idea of how bad things were before.

Tomorrow we'll be tackling the remaining 2 shrubs, as well as putting in a very low retaining wall. The grass is pretty aggressive, and I don't want to have to pull it out of the flowerbeds again next year. I may also weed the former vegetable garden. I'd really like to do something with the flower bed bordering our neighbor's fence, but there is too much grass and raspberry thicket to mess with it now. Maybe in the fall or next spring, when I can actually see in there to work.

As for now, I'm going to take a well-deserved (and much-needed) bath.