Chicken Coops

Our new chicken coop still has not been built.  However, it is a priority this year to get it done.  We have several projects that need to be tended to and this is one of them.  Unfortunately, we are buried under about 2 feet of snow at the moment, so I have lots of time to plan!

First on our list this year is an arbor for my daughter’s secret garden.  When my husband built my soap shed, that created a little space about 4 or 5 ft wide and about 18 ft long behind it.  My neighbor behind me, built a beautiful rock wall with a cedar fence on top.  It is beautiful.  So my youngest daughter decided that she would claim that space as her own and it would become her secret garden.  For several years she has longed for an arbor with a gate at the entrance.  The ones we liked in the stores are very pricey and so we have not been able to purchase one for her.  I have made them in the past out of PVC pipe and that vinyl lattice, but it would be hard to attach a gate to it.  We did do that in the front yard, but my husband could not install the gate onto the arbor.  He had to install two posts directly behind the arbor and attach the gate to that.  Since she wants her gate in the front of the  arbor, that would look kind of funny.

So I came up with an idea the other day.  We are going to use 4×4′s and make a frame out of those and attach wooden lattice to it on the sides and top.  Then make a garden door out of lattice on the front of the arbor.  It will look adorable.  We need to repaint our house and shed this year and I am thinking of going with sage green and cream trim instead of the current mocha and chocolate trim.  In either case we will paint the arbor either cream or a very light mocha to match the house and shed.  I already have a Newport Fairy climbing rose-bush planted at the edge of the shed and it is just waiting for an arbor to climb over.

Our second must do project this spring is to build a small deck in front of my pantry.  You may recall that I took a small shed that was attached to our house, moved my husbands tools out of it into a larger shed and converted it into a pantry.  This is working out very well, however, there is a substantial drop from our back deck to the ground in front of the pantry.  My old knees take offense to this drop each time I have to step down or up.   So that will be done right after the arbor.  This will also make the trek over to the clothes lines much nicer as well.  It will be a nice, gradual drop.  And even if I eventually move the clothes lines, (which I am considering doing because I would love to put in an outdoor shower or some bee hives where the clothes lines currently are)it will be nice to have a gradual decline into the yard instead of just jumping down!

Third project is to finish up our cobblestone paths.  What my husband has done so far looks great!  Now if I can just get him to finish them.  Our daughter wants a cobblestone path in her secret garden as well, so he has a lot to do.  Our neighbor Charlie has offered to loan him his cement mixer so I am hoping he will take him up on that offer and get them all done.  It isn’t that expensive to do and with the cement mixer, it would save his back and arms!

Fourth and Fifth projects are our chicken coop and goat house.  Last summer we did remove the old chicken coop and pen.  Since the goats are currently dried off, we converted the milking room into a chicken coop and put them in the yard with the goats.  This works out great as long as the goats don’t get in the chicken coop as they eat all the chicken food!  What weirdos.  Anyway, the chickens are doing a great job at eating the bugs and we had almost no flies last year at all.  They also eat some of the alfalfa as well as their own lay crumbles, corn and all the kitchen scraps we can give them.

I saw a really cute project online the other day.  Some one had turned an old set of 6 nest boxes into a planter.  I am considering doing this on the side of my new chicken coop.  It seems that a  new coop should have new nest boxes, so I could paint the old ones and attach them to the coop.  I could use them to plant lettuce and other veggies for the chickens.  I could close in the space underneath and use that to store extra feed.  I can’t wait to get started on my new coop and goat house!

Name Change

You may have noticed that I changed the name on the blog from Ivywood Cottage to Cobblestone Cottage.  I will explain why.  Our first house here in the mountains, we named Ivywood Cottage.  We loved that house.  When we had to sell it in 2004, we had been using that name so long it was hard not to.  We tried naming our current house Ivywood Cottage as well, but after being here for 6 years now, it just isn’t Ivywood.  It is Cobblestone Cottage and as such, I decided to change the name of the blog.  However, my soap shed has now become Ivywood Cottage and so I will leave the address of the blog as ivywood.wordpress.com so those of you who follow this blog can still find it.  Ivywood Cottage will always have a special place in my heart and so it seemed fitting to  name my soap shed that.  I have attached my original sign that used to hang in the arbor as you entered Ivywood Cottage, on to my shed.  It is an appropriate name for my soap shed as I have ivy growing all over it.

As we have been working on the yard, we have been putting in cobblestone paths.  I also noticed that our little cottage is the exact shape of several English cottages I have seen pictures of, or blueprints for.  It seems to lend its self to that old, cobblestone English cottage design, so that is what we are going for.  It is my plan to get the rest of the paths in this summer.  Down the road we will then begin adding river rock to the actual house.  Not sure exactly where on the house yet.  Cost will be a big factor.  I have seen pictures of stone houses in Ireland and love that look.  Who doesn’t want their house to look like it just fell out of a Thomas Kinkade picture?  Anyway, Cobblestone Cottage is a much better fit for this house.  I am sorry for any confusion this has caused anyone.

 

I’m Back!!!!

I am not sure what happened here, but I seem to have been absent for a couple of years.  Shame on me!  So here I am again and I will try not to be so remiss in my blogging from now on.  Life has changed quite a bit since my last post.  I will try to catch you all up.

I used to sit and blog while my youngest daughter was doing her school work.  You all know we are homeschoolers.  It gave me something to do while she was working.  She isn’t a great self-starter, so sitting with her worked better than leaving her work on her own.  After we closed the business, my part-time job began giving me more hours.  My daughter is now almost 16 and is in the 11th grade.  I no longer have to sit with her while she does her school work and I am now working 4 hours per day.  By the time I get home, it seems that I have much to do and very little energy to spare and so the blog took a back seat.

In January of 2009, I began taking harp lessons and that has been very exciting for me and I try to spend 2 to 3 hours a day practicing and learning.  It is extremely challenging and my teacher tells me it takes a minimum of 5 years of lessons and experience until you are fairly good at playing.  I am only 2 years in so I have a loooong way to go yet.  My goal is to not only play for my enjoyment, but to eventually earn a part-time income from playing gigs around town.  I will eventually make a harp blog to let everyone know what is going on with that and so I don’t blog this blog down with harp stuff.

We closed The Cottage Bathe on Dec. 31, 2008.  It was a wise choice.  It was getting harder and harder to keep up with it both physically and financially.  Prices on raw ingredients have risen so dramatically that it really didn’t make sense to continue on.  We did not want to expand further than we already were as it would have involved renting a new production space and buying ingredients by the pallet.

As far as the house and the garden go, money has been tight and we have not achieved nearly as much as we had hoped to.  I will update with some current projects.  We still have 5 goats and 9 chickens.  Our last batch of chickens have not been that great and several have already died off.  I am hoping to order a few more in the next month or two.  We still have not been able to build our cottage chicken coop, but it is high on our to do list for this spring, so hopefully now that I am working steady, some of these projects will come to fruition.  I will be posting pictures and our progress.

I want to thank everyone who continued to find this blog and read it during my absence.  I am getting back in the saddle and hope to post regularly from now on.

Vicki