Chicken coop

I mentioned to Wayne that I wanted to build a chicken house, so he said lets do it! So on Saturday afternoon we built most of the chicken house out of the scrap from the Waterjet guys and the legs are from the steel (bedframe?) we found in the roof when Alison's dad was here.

 

 

 

Free scrap

I went to the guy who did my waterjet cutting for the spinning wheel and dug through his scrap pile and got a whole lot of stuff. This picture is the plastic/perspex off cuts I got with some 18mm ply.

The second picture is a sheet of glass from a reception window in a hotel (I think). I got this for the roof of the hen house.

And the third picture is a bundle of ply wood which we used for the hen house and taking the chimney down. It isn't very good ply but they are 101cm x 122cm and free!

Liam, Zac and I also finished cleaning up the paving around the greenhouse, there was some lovely soil that we dug up but it was littered with broken glass so I ended up throwing it out.

I also found that if you put your foot on the bottom of the greenhouse and push it, the whole thing moves! So I straightened it up in line with the paving stones :-)

I have finally got the instant lawn/turf and laid it.

Finally got around to leveling the grass/soil on the other side of the pond where we removed the small trees.

Crocuses popped up out the lawn and they look wonderful till someone drives over them.

Lathe finished

It took us two days in the end to move it all across to the shed and then to jack it up bit by bit to get to the same height as the cabinet....... have a look at all the blocks we used.

Once it was at cabinet height, we slid it across on a plank and lowered it down into position with leavers. Job done!

The Lathe is moving!!!

Today Alison's dad helped me move the lathe. We started by building a platform to over the lathe. We used the window sill on the far side to rest it on. We then levered the lathe head up onto wooden blocks above the cabinet, we then tied it in this position with webbing and removed the wooden blocks so it hung in the air. We then slid the cabinet out and took it to the summer house / shed on the trolley.

We lowered the lathe down onto the trolley using the webbing and rolled this out to the shed using ramps that Vincent constructed to get it up onto the decking and then down onto the grass, then up again into the shed.

Finally at the shed with the lathe on the trolley which sank into the grass. Now all we have to do is get the 200kg chunk back onto the cabinet! But that is tomorrows job.

Sketchup view of the house as it is. I am not finished with this as you can see and a few measurents might be a bit out, but most of them are pretty accurate.

This sequence of photos runs from bottom to top, so start at the bottom.

The shed in its final resting place.

Laying the paving stones in the new position, we also dug out about 10 wheel barrows of sharp sand and stone from the original foundation to re-use for laying the paving again. It was rather hard work and I think Vincent is looking forward to leaving the forced labour camp ;-)

Alison's dad and I broke it free and tried to move it in one piece, but the gap between the trees was too small so we had to take the back and two sides off to get it in place.

When we moved the shed there was a big hole in the hedge, so we used one of the walls from the chicken house that I broke down to extend the height of the fence on a temporary basis.



This was the original postion of the garden / bike shed.

Do you remember the light you gave us and it looks like it came off a battle ship, well it is now Liam's reading light. I need to get a proper piece of wire for it and a switch. But it works really well, so thanks for the light Dad!

All of us sitting on the anex roof cutting the creeper.

Testing email notification

This is a test to see if we get and email telling us about this new post. Hopefully in future, when I post pictures you should get and email telling you about them. I won't be posting anything important on here so don't feel you always a have to look at it when you get an email.

Shower project: the pole the shower nozel attaches to was short and high up so the kids couldn't get to the soap dish or shower. I bought a piece of stainless form my scrap guy and made a very long pole. In the picture you can see a tiny white spot on the wall behind the pole right near the top of the picture, this was the original point of the bottom of the shower pole!!! It was Bernice height :-)