The Winter of the Outbuildings

This has been the winter of the outbuildings. My goal this winter was to get the backyard ready for spring planting, chickens and hopefully goats.

The first building built was my garden shed. As is true with most of our projects it is only partially finished. It still needs the door and the shelves inside but I am thrilled to have a place in the garden to store all my gardening tools. Erik got it to this stage before Christmas, the winds came and knocked it over but thankfully didn't damage it. It is now staked down and has withstood fairly substantial gusts of wind since then. Oh, and paint. It needs to be painted.

Next we started work on our chicken coop. Or the "Chicken Palace" as I've started to refer to it. I spent more hours than I want to admit pouring of coop/enclosure designs at Backyard Chickens. Then based on a few of them, drew up some plans.
And the work commenced.

Erik has slowly gotten better at delegating through the whole project and so I've been able to hammer quite a few pieces of the coop together.

I quite enjoy it. And it sure beats standing out in the cold just watching.


This is as far as we've progressed. Still quite a bit of work to do but it's getting there.


We've even put down leftover linoleum from our kitchen on the floor of the coop to make the plywood floor last longer and make it easier to clean out. The front here will have large doors that open up (also to help with ease of cleaning). And those holes at the back (the black squares right now) are where the nesting boxes will be attached. The nesting boxes will open from the back so that we can reach in and grab the eggs from there. The whole area will be enclosed with chicken wire and we found a neat door at Cart'm for $5 for the door into the run.


Here's an overview of how the backyard is progressing. It's the view from the backdoor. Eventually the goat enclosure will go back to the left behind the garden shed.
Slowly, slowly projects are getting done.

More Projects and My Excuses

I have been remiss in posting as of late and I am sorry.
So to sort of catch you up to date I'm posting pictures of most of the lovely projects that have kept me busy and away not to mention the getting back into the schedule of all things homeschooling as well as nursing sick kiddos back to health and trying to get my own health woes under control (darn thyroid).

This is the little stuffed soccer ball I made for my adorable nephew Will for Christmas.


Marilyn liked it so much I made her one for Christmas as well.


The boys each received a crocheted dinosaur, these were awfully fun to make.


And Hobbes. Hobbes belongs to Jessie.


This circle scarf belongs to my sister Mindy now, I made a red one for Hannah's violin teacher and an aqua green one for myself. I love the pattern.

I crocheted a blanket for my sister Beth but alas forgot to take pictures. I'll have to borrow it back for a photo op.

My MIL gave me a Joann's gift card for Christmas and it went towards the recovering of my dining room chairs. We were tired of sitting on plywood. You see, my wonderful mother recovered these chairs about a year and a half ago or so in oilcloth. They were easy to clean and really fun. Only Clayton decided it would be fun to jab a pencil down through the seats and then pick at the holes. So I duct taped them. And then it was fun to pull off the duct tape and pull out the old foam pad.
So.... new foam, regular cotton fabric, vinyl and a little work and they look as new ever (and are still easy to clean). The children have been dully warned and/or threatened about stabbing and otherwise destroying the new coverings.



And if you notice the feet of this chair, it is wearing socks. (Please don't notice the floor, I didn't sweep.) I've been crocheting "socks" to fit over the feet of the chairs so they won't scratch my floors any longer and I don't have to be forever buying those ridiculous little sticky foam pad things that don't adhere very long to the bottom of your chair. It's a great use of scrap yarn and it's quite colorful depending on how tall your "socks" are.