The Outside of the Cottage

 Well, we have been in the cottage farmette for about three months now.  We are taking our time in fixing it up.  We have done a lot with the inside, but we still have a ways to go.  One of our priorities before winter comes is the outside.  The house needed painting badly!  The decks are in bad shape as well.  There are boards that are unscrewed, and, as you can see in the above picture, the boards all need to be stained and sealed.  After the house is painted, we are going to work on the decks.  We found a product at Home Depot that is a thick paint-tinted plastic that will make the decks look sharp.  Picture one is a picture of the side of the house, but it has been turned into the main entrance.  Both sides had very overgrown bushes like what you see at the left of the picture below.  We wrapped chain around them and yanked them out with our SUV.  I will replace with roses and snow ball bushes in the next couple of weeks. 

 We will trim the bushes by the fireplace, but I promised my husband if he took the other bushes out, he could keep these three.  I am not sure what I am going to do about the black plastic under the rocks that was torn up when we pulled out the bushes. 

 This is the front of the house.  I am sure this was once the main entrance but has since been enclosed with a deck.  We pulled the bushes away from the front of the house which was shown in a previous blog post.  I love this little deck.  Our dogs can come out onto it with us, and they are safe.  The colors I have chosen for the house paint are a dark gray, cream trim and black for the doors.  It is going to look great.  I can't wait for it to be completed!!

 This is the side of the house opposite to where the current front door is.  We have a nice little deck that leads to the yard.  We have room for a grill and table and chairs.  The deck is off of the bedroom we use as a Master. 

 This is the back of the house.  What is interesting about this house is that we have a door leading to the outside on every side of the house.  This back part is also very clearly an addition.  We think it was originally a back deck and possibly a one-car garage.  I wish we could find out more about the history of this house.  I have been talking to neighbors, but we still have very little information. 

Those are the before pictures.  The outside paint job should be completed by the end of this week, and I will post after pictures.  We have big plans for this place!  Since this is going to be our last home, I want it to be everything that we want.  We have future plans to add a two-car garage, a swimming pool, a koi pond and courtyard garden, an orchard, a berry garden, and much larger vegetable garden.  Our goal is to become as self-sufficient as possible with few financial obligations.  We are trying to think of ways to make money off of our little farmette.  We have ideas that include a possible pumpkin farm, organic-raised chickens, and on and on.  God has blessed us so richly!  We are very thankful, and we thank you for joining us on this journey. 

The Outside Chicken Pen

After we got the chickens moved into their coop, my dad started working on their outside pen. We wanted them to be able to spend time outside without being eaten by coyotes. So my dad put up posts and wrapped wire around them. He leaned ladders up against the window, inside and outside.  He then opened the window to let the chickens out.

They seem to have gotten the hang of going outside by themselves.

 Going back inside is a different story.

The other night, my mom and I came home from a wedding when we realized the chickens were still outside. My dad and brother weren't home, and it was getting darker rapidly. We don't have a light out there, so we had to get the chickens inside as soon as we got home.

 



We went out to the chicken coop, hoping that most the of the chickens had gone inside by themselves. But they hadn't. There were still about twenty chickens out there.

So there we were, in our fancy dresses and shoes, catching chickens and putting them inside. Thankfully, they were all half-asleep. The catching them was the easy part. However, when we put them inside, they didn't go down the ladder by themselves. They just sat on the window. We had to push them in.

We couldn't see inside the coop, but we kept hearing thump, thump, thump. We were scared that the chickens were falling to their deaths inside the coop. I went inside to make sure that we weren't killing our chickens. And we weren't. Once they got inside, they were able to fly to the ground. It wasn't graceful, by any means, but they were still alive.

It was quite the experience, catching the chickens in our wedding clothes.