Thursday, January 10, 2008

Building Our Chicken House




In this video my turkey pecks me, hard! My sister laughs every time she watches it. (not funny)

(The chicken house building starts below, after I stop complaining about my video problem.)

I have been trying to upload a video to youtube for days now. I got a really cool Flip digital video camera for Christmas and I took a movie of my little barnyard but even though it's in youtube I can't get it to come over to my blog. Here is a picture of my Flip. I love it.



Frustrated does not even describe strongly enough how I feel. I am trying the blogger video upload, we'll see if it works. My fingers are crossed. (Update-it has not worked yet, I am trying again as I post this after work. If anyone has suggestions for me I will be eternally greatful!) OK, it did not work again so I am going to try to paste the URL from youtube, hopefully it will work. (I think it may have.) It did!







So, as I was saying a while ago, we built an awesome chicken house. Here is what Home Depot unloaded in July. We bought 100 landscape timbers when they were on sale for $1.99 each. They are 8' long and, I think, 3 1/2 inches thick.




We had a swimming pool that we never used and nobody wanted to clean so it was the perfect, spot. It was a 18' round and perfectly level. I know it was level because the first time we tried to fill the pool it wasn't level and all the water, ALL 5000 GALLONS OF IT, ended up washing over the side and down the hill. And we paid for that water too!







We left the blue tarp down to discourage weeds. And started with some 4 x 6 base timbers.





I will finish this and add some more pictures later today after work. (And by the way...it doesn't look as if my video is going to work. I will try AGAIN when I get home.)
OK..... I am home and still frustrated with the videos but I need to move on!

Anyway.....We used 8" lag bolts and Kevin used his air compressor to bolt the whole thing together. He used a really long drill bit because it was the only one we had, we had purchased it to drill some holes for wiring and it definitly fit the bill for this job. He just marked it with a permanent marker at the depth he wanted and it worked great.



Then we checked for square and added some support timbers for the flooring. We chose to build this during August. We both took a week of vacation and had planned to get the chicken house done and also the fence but it was so hot (90s) that we could only work for a couple hours and then had to go inside. Misery does not describe it! The area only has a little shade and it was not close to where we were building at all.

That's why we put the pool there, no leaves to blow in and the sun would make it warm so the kids could swim. Actually the youngest tried to get in in April, I think it was. She was so excited to swim and bugging us incessantly that we finally told her, go ahead, get in, all the while thinking she would not even get her toes wet but she actually stayed in for a while. We couldn't believe it! She loves the water. We finally had to tell her to get out, we were worried she would turn blue. She was cold but did not want to admit it. But she did say that she would quit bugging us to swim and she did.





I have Daylilys that we transplanted this spring all along the edge of the work area and Kevin was not too happy to hear me constantly telling him to NOT stomp my flowers. I had babied them all summer and they had finally taken off and were blooming.

Again, if anyone has a suggestion as to what I'm doing wrong with my video please let me know. Thanks!

More next time! I think I got it although I would like it to be in a little box on the side but beggars can't be choosers!



(UPDATE) Here is the longer version that I finally uploaded. Skip it if you found the first one boring. This has more of the same except that darn turkey pecks me again and then tries to do it a third time. My sister has been bothering me to upload this longer version so she can laugh at me even more! Hope you are happy Amy!


5 comments:

Omelay said...

i like the chicken video. the seed presents you mentioned in your comment were supposed to be christmas presents. we were a bit late.

amy said...

ok, so Tom said if that turkey pecks him, it will be dinner. love the video. i laugh out loud every time i watch it. hope your not in too much pain from that turkey, i think he is my favorite one now. plus great shots of rusty.

jolynna said...

I like the chicken video too. Your black dog resembles one of my dogs.

I love your chicken house too. It looks like it will keep your chickens safe from marauding neighbor dogs, too. It was interesting seeing the egg collecting apparatus (and the eggs that weren't in the nests).

Your turkeys are beautiful.

jolynna said...

Hi,

This is jolynna from Turkey Creek Lane. Thanks for sending me over here. I loved the video.

I hope we have wild turkeys at my house. My husband is going to put corn out by our garden for them.

I am switching web addresses to
turkeycreeklane.com.

I really like your blog and have added a link to you on my site.

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