We’re just starting week four of isolation here at the Gillespie household.
Sunday we woke up to find that one of our two flocks of chickens had lost two birds. The rooster and one of the hens. This is the flock we have out in the goat pen with the ducks. It’s next to the road, and we assumed that the goats wouldn’t tolerate anything that would bother the chickens. Apparently we were wrong.
Jessie talked about combining the two flocks, but the pen would be too small, so I volunteered to whip up a chicken coop. It took me most of the day, but we came up with something respectable. I had to go get some lumber to finish the sheeting on the outside, and I picked up some extra lumber so we can have some on hand. We built three doors on the back side so that we can have three next boxes, although that turned into two next boxes and an access door as the day wore on and we decided that we just wanted things to be finished. We also built the floor on a hinge so cleaning the coop will be as simple as sliding back a couple of barrel bolts and letting the floor drop down. I went out on Tuesday and nailed some roll roofing onto the top to help keep things watertight.
The real shenanigans begin when we went to put it into the goat pen. It was awkwardly heavy to move, so I decided to load it into the truck. That was easy enough, and then we backed it down the small hill from the roadside and into the goat pen and unloaded it. The truck promptly got stuck when we went to get it out of the pen. Its an old 1978 two wheel drive Ford F100 Custom. The tires aren’t great. It’s basically used for dump runs and getting big stuff from the local hardware store. I backed up and gently moved it forwards a few times and each time I’d get defeated by the short hill up to the road. It’s only a few feet…but it was enough. Eventually I got it up the hill to the point where I was ALMOST on the road, so I set the parking brake and shut the engine off. I opened the door to grab some lumber or something to give the tires a better grip and the truck slid backwards and wedged the open door on big fence post halting its backward motion. I couldn’t get the truck to move forward, and if it moved backwards I’d more than likely rip the door off the truck.
Uh oh.
Well, we called the neighbors since we couldn’t leave my truck in the middle of an open gate all night long. We were already having trouble keeping the goats and chickens in the pen with the truck stuck where it was. Our neighbor brought down his racing dune buggy which just happened to have a lightweight winch on the front and with a little bit of finessing we were able to get it all taken care of.
We rounded up the chickens and hustled them into the new coop, and that was pretty much the end of that excitement.
Tuesday after I got the roofing on the chicken coop, we all decided to go for a walk and take the goats out on leads. This was every bit as comical as you can imagine with the goats stopping every few feet to sample a treat from the side of the road. Pictures are worth a thousand words…so here are some:
So, on the 4th of July, with the weather being 89 degrees, overcast, and muggy as I’ll get out, I went out and set posts. Our current roommate, Stevie had already cleaned up the stairs running down to the bridge and she’s working on a footpath for the kids that goes down to the water so they don’t have to run through the mud to get there.
Thursday evening, I found several likely candidates in our cedar trees to make handrails out of, and added some rails to the project. The idea is to take the curved cedar boughs that need to be trimmed out of the trees anyway and make them into a nice, natural looking railing system. So far it’s working out ok. I’ll post more as the project moves along. The posts on the bridge are going to stay tall, in the hopes that for special events (like the upcoming wedding) we can string lights and other decorations across the tall posts.