It has begun!

Most of you know we live in a county park/campground, where Al is the Park Ranger. In exchange for Al being available 24/7 (and I DO mean 24/7!) we live in a county provided house inside the park. The house is a pre-fab modular home that was built in the 70’s. Over time the windows have rotted, the roof needs replaced (and we found out the attic is full of bats), the siding is falling off, the block walls in the garage are buckling, and the basement is wet and moldy. None of these things can easily be fixed. The Supervisors decided it wasn’t worth putting money into it to get by for a few more years, so they are going to replace it. It will be built on the same footprint as the old one, with the same basement walls but new garage walls and waterproofing on the rest of it.

I know some of you are saying “but my taxes are going to go up”. That’s not probable from this project alone. It’s a capital improvement of the county’s infrastructure. We pay taxes in this county as well on our 3-plex, and I don’t want them to go up either. But the house is falling down and it’s time to get it fixed right. Even though we don’t own this house it is “our home” and has been for 20 years. Our kids grew up here. We have spent tons of our own money over the years to make it livable like we want it, including carpeting & tile on the porch and downstairs, new interior doors, paint, and much more like it was our own home. And since it will be built with county money, we plan to make sure that the new house is done extremely budget conscious. We will be doing many things to save money like lay the flooring (that is reclaimed), paint, countertops and anything else we can do to save the crazy labor costs just like we would if it was our own money.

Okay…..with all of THAT out of the way, let’s get started!

Since we have the camper, we can easily move into it during construction. Al ran sewer, water & electricity to a pad in front of the house and this will be our home for the next few months.

We bought an outdoor carpet last week and Al made a table and set up his grilling station. With the TV & stereo in the garage, we have a great outdoor “living room”. For the last few years we have been going to Texas for a month every spring in the camper, so we have some practice with living in it long term, and it’s not too bad. We will see if I still have that same sentiment at the end of 4 months!  They say we should be in the new house by November 1.

We will have a front row seat for the construction.

This week they are stripping the house of the trim, doors, a couple newer windows, fans, lights, kitchen flooring and anything else that can be reused, either on this house or somewhere else in the county.

We are reusing the kitchen cabinets and the kitchen flooring, so they are coming out as well to be put into storage.

With the new house I’m looking forward to many things: central air (we have two window AC units that we purchased that don’t do the job), winter tight windows & doors (no more shoveling snow inside), forced air heat (no more loading the wood furnace and having to open/close the windows to regulate the heat) and so much more.

The schedule is to demolish the house on Monday. It should be interesting!

Chicken Update

Remember the baby chicks?

They have a new home!

Our coop is really only made to house 10-15 full grown chickens, so we couldn’t keep all of them. They were getting bigger, and no longer needed mama. Matt had a co-worker in Des Moines that had been thinking about getting chickens, so they agreed to take our babies.

Matt and Erin agreed to take them back the last time they were home. But they had to be caught first.

And have their wings clipped.

You clip chickens wings so that they won’t fly. When they try they are off balance, and will stop. You just cut the feathers partially off one wing. It doesn’t hurt them because you just cut feathers, although from all the squawking, you would think their whole wing has been cut off.

Matt’s co-worker has 5 young boys, so I hoped that it would all work out good. I think it’s good to teach another generation how to respect and treat animals, and to show them where some of their food comes from.

We also gave them one of our older hens that wasn’t looking too good. The rooster REALLY liked her and kept pulling her feathers out. She was looking pretty bad, and I didn’t think she would probably make it if we kept her. She must have been laying the super tiny eggs, because we haven’t had any since she left. She wasn’t much bigger than the chicks, so it worked out good to send her too.

They all went into a box (with lots of holes) and headed to Des Moines.

This week we received a cute little thank you note in the mail that all was good and they were enjoying them.  It was sweet.

On a bad note, however, with the crazy amount of raccoons in the park this year, we have lost 6 more, including the rooster, so we are down to only 8 hens. :(