Winter, Cold, Cold, Cold

It's winter and I got nothing!

This is what it looks like outside. It's so hard to water chickens in the winter. I use a garden hose to fill my heated buckets and drain them out really good so they don't freeze. Well it froze a couple days ago and I had to drag 50' of hose into the house and let it thaw. That hose is heavy! The birds go through so much water that I have to fill the the buckets about every other day, brrrr! On goes my snowmobile suit and out I go. My gloves almost always get wet trying to hook up the hose, oh brother. Plus, Flipper and Buddy take a bath in their water and slobber food into it so I have to dump their bucket and rinse it every couple days. I guess it could be worse.

My blackberries. So very cold.

On another note, I love this gate, I forget where I found this picture. I really want a gate and fence like this.
Also, I want my garden to look like this. Karl, over at pile of o'melys gardens like this.

I hope we can do this this spring. I love this cute little picture.

Anyways, see I got nothing, every time I watch the weather I'm always hoping for warmer temps. I think we may get 40 degrees for one day, tomorrow then it's back to the 20's.

I am so excited to hatch some eggs that I can't think.

Til next time,

Beth

Now the Kitchen

The main problem with remodeling in the winter is -where to put all the de-construction junk!

All the ripped off paneling can't just be thrown out on the deck.

Plus, we tore down a large (ugly) pantry that was FULL so where do we put all of the food too.

I fit most of the food in the other cupboards, after getting rid of all the stuff we don't ever use. As far as the piles of wood, most of it went out to the trash last week so it is much better now.


Here is the back of the large ugly pantry.




Now the paneling is removed and Kevin is unhooking the electric boxes and switches. Most of it gone.






Going.....


Going.....


Going....

Almost gone.

Now for a break in the remodel to check out my basket of eggs. They aren't laying too much now so each egg is like gold to me.

Check out this awesome rooster that my mom got for me for Christmas. His tail has measuring spoons in it. They slide right in the center of the tail.


See, how cool! I love him.

This turkey decided to hang out on the frame to our shade tent.

We had a foot of snow and -11 degree temperatures but nothing fazes our big hairy monster of a dog. She laid there for a while (quite a while) and the snow doesn't even melt.

She brings it right in and shakes it off in the house, nice!


(Back to the kitchen.) Now the pantry is all gone and here is the beam in place.

Now we have all this room to move around, heaven!


The island will go where the old ugly tile is. I guess we are going to build one. I found a really cool one on Craig's List but it was a little too pricey so we will go with the homemade one.

Kinda something like this.

This is my inspiration for the kitchen. Kevin is going to make new cupboards for the upper shelves and we are going to reface the lowers. I want some open ones like in the picture for dishes and he's going to make some with solid doors and maybe some glass doors too.

It's kind of funny cause the handles on these cupboards are exactly the same as what's on mine and I hate them.

They look so nice on the cupboards in the other picture.

Actually, it doesn't really matter how nice they look in the inspiration kitchen because there is no way I could use them after hating them all this time. How dumb is the placement of the handles anyway, right in the middle of the door, what were they thinking.

More to come,

Beth

Time For Some Change!

You all may not think that we need to update and if that is true then you all are stuck in the bad paneling days of the 70's and 80's like my house.This was what my looked like bedroom, thankfully I can say WAS!

We had way too much heavy furniture-entertainment center, computer desk and too much stuff on the walls-pictures, cork boards crossbows (Yes, we had not one but two crossbows on our wall over the bed.)... time for a change!

This is where our bed was and you can still see the hooks for the crossbows and there is a crossbow accessory still hanging on it. (I think it is a rope to assist with cocking it.)

I took the day off for my birthday and called my sister, Amy over to help and we got busy. The night before Kevin and I emptied most of the junk and Amy helped with the rest in the morning. Then I sanded it all with my cool little mouse sander and then we started to prime.

Kevin is not into painting but he comes in at the end when we don't care anymore and touched up all the spots that we missed. Which were quite a few!

Not sure what Amy was doing here, something with the roller.



Then we started to paint. The color looks a little strange but it is really good in real life.

I painted the ceiling the same color as the walls, it may not suit everyone but I love it. I did the same thing in both bathrooms and it's great. My mom would never go for it though, ceilings are white in her world. In my world, especially with me not having the patience to draw a straight line to trim, ceilings are the same color as the walls!


Cleo helped with the paint by brushing by it and getting it all over her. It will be on there til spring when she gets a haircut. (OK, not sure what is going on with the date on the picture, must have jumped way into the future. I don't like having the date on the pictures but with this new camera I have not taken the time to figure out how to take it off.)

My new computer desk. There's not much room to store anything, bad for me good for "no clutter". Although if you saw it now it had stuff all over it that I have no where to put it. We will be getting a black filing cabinet, all paperwork will go into it so that will help.

I'm also looking for a really cool shelf for over the desk.... I just went on a 20 min. search for a shelf picture online but there is nothing like what I want. I'm probably going to have to make it.

Nice, huh? No crossbows over the bed. Now we don't want to hang up anything. Amy has the perfect, coolest picture thing but she isn't giving it up.

Next we start on the kitchen.

Til next time,
Beth

It Was An.....

EVIL, CHICKEN KILLING...

snarling, biting, murdering...

MINK!

GONE NOW!

Till next time,

Beth

Another Creature in the Barn

We have had some pretty bad days around here in the last few months. Something has been killing our chickens. In the blurry picture below is one of my Maran roosters. All three were killed.


A couple of the hens were killed too. All in all about 15 chickens dead. It seemed the young ones that roosted outside were being killed. Sometimes three at a time. We thought it was raccoons. We fortified our fence, electric top and bottom. Worked for a while. Then on Christmas day it was the last straw.

My beautiful Mama chicken and three of her babies were killed. She must have died trying to protect her babies. There was blood splattered all over the chicken house, up the wall and all over. And this happened on the side of the fence closest to the house. She was left in the small chicken house while her babies were dragged to the fence and partially eaten. She was laying on her side with her eyes closed and her neck all bitten up.

Here they are when they were chicks, so cute and fun to watch.

It was so strange. The creature would drag the chickens it had killed to the fence and just eat the head off and leave the body there. Really weird. If it was a raccoon, we couldn't understand how the fence was not shocking it. Plus there was a chicken killed before Thanksgiving that we had dropped by the back of the barn and forgotten about. The creature had drug it into the barn and pulled it behind the woodpile into a really small space. Was it a possum? We had found a possum in the barn before. We could not figure it out! A possum was not fast enough to catch a running chicken.

Finally we had gotten lucky. The other night when we came home there was a couple of inches of snow on the ground. There were tracks of whatever was killing our chickens everywhere. There was a path leading from the barn to a previously killed chicken. We had left it there hoping that the creature would eat it and not kill more chickens. It worked!

Look at the teeth marks it left.

Plus, look at the tracks.

You can almost see the sharp claws of the beast. It could have been easily mistaken for cat tracks but cats have retractable claws. You can definitely see claws in this picture. At first we thought it could have been a large tom cat since no other creatures are around here. We have seen the occasional fox but there is no way a fox could get under or over our fence. Look how it has a hopping gait. You would think it was a bunny but no bunnies have fangs like in the first picture. After much research we thought we knew what it was. There is one animal whose back feet land in front of it's front feet like in the picture. We have not heard of or nor have we seen any of sign these animals being around here at all. We know it's possible but rare.

Behind the barn were these tracks. It was going here to drink water then back to the barn.

This picture is from inside the fence. Look at how it slid right under.

It has to be something small, so small it can fit under the electric fence but powerful and fast enough to kill chickens. Any thoughts yet?

It practically had a highway back and forth to the fence, enjoying an evening of eating my chicken.

Very busy varmint.

So....Kevin got busy, now he had a clue and know what action to take.

He set up a couple box traps near it's trails (even though we had set them many times before and it had avoided them) and he also set up one trap that would not fail. He found a narrow opening that it had been traveling through and set the trap there, securing it well.

A special trap for animals that are vicious and wiley and like to kill my chickens. Kevin set the trap and fine tuned it, knowing that he wanted to get it on the first try.

It was a conibear trap.

To be continued......

Beth

ps.warning: don't google pictures of a connibear trap, I did and saw stuff that I wished I hadn't.

I'm an animal lover but I love my chickens more that whatever was eating them