Beautiful Shelf (for FREE!)

My husband is quite the talented fellow.  I talked earlier about how he built our chicken coop for under $50 using re-purposed materials.  Well, now he's at it AGAIN.  He used those same scraps from the local soda company.

The corners of these are held together with brackets, so he took his table saw to cut them out.  The remaining pieces are the boards he used to make my shelf.

He did his magic, like he does and produced this beautiful and rustic shelf.

The details from how it went from boards to the shelf is a little fuzzy for me.  Perhaps, if we get enough interest, I can get my talented husband to be a guest blogger and describe how he did this. 

We decided not to sand or paint anything.  We really like the rustic look this shelf has.  But if you prefer a more finished look, you can always sand and paint as desired.

Chicken Coop

I have some older chickens that live outside right now.  My husband built their coop for them.

My husband, Chris, is a genius.  Most of our materials we got for free, and my husband was able to put it all together to make this rustic coop.  The siding is cedar which he found on Craigslist.  The 4x4 posts which provide the stability were from a fencing company.  When the company tears down an old fence, they just burn it.  We got to reuse it!! Yippee!

The framing is made out of old wooden squares that are used a local soda company.  Here is one of the rectangles:

Chris has oodles of them.  We have used them to raise some beds in the garden and we have cut them up and burned them in our wood stove.  

So those are the frame and the gate.  You can see the gate propped open by the 2x4 on the right side of the coop.  

Chris had to buy the roof and the hardware.  That was it!  Let's take a look on the inside.  The nesting boxes are made out of old shelves in the basement of our house.  Chris made the roof with a slope so that the chickens could not roost (and therefore poop) on top of them.  We also put old golf balls inside of the boxes so that the girls would have an idea where to lay.  I'm not sure if this works, as our girls haven't started laying yet.

One the right, you can see the roosts Chris installed.  This is just old dried out bamboo that we also got for free!!! Darn, we are doing good.  Thank goodness for my husband's handiness.  You can see below the roosts there is bunches of poop.  We do a deep bedding method.  So I simply put more fresh straw on it every few days.  Over the winter, the decomposition will heat the coop, and when it starts to get warmer we will clean out the coop and put the bedding in our gardens and around our trees.  

We bought the waterer and food dispenser, though.  We hung them from the ceiling so that there would be limited dirt and scratchings in the food and water. 

Overall, this entire project was Chris's baby and he did an excellent job.  He has a vision,  and skill and always amazes me.

Jaxson also gave the set-up an inspection and he approved.

Wash Line Paint Job

My husband constructed a wash line for me.  He told me I could paint it, and use any color I desired.  I love bright bold colors.  When I first bought a house, I painted my living room Barney The Purple Dinosaur purple.  When my husband moved in, we painted is orange with dark blue highlights.  It looked amazing.

The house we live in now has white walls, but I'm not ready for that project.  I have so many other projects that take priority.  (some of which you'll be reading about on here)

So I decided to pick many different pretty colors.  I painted the whole thing with a white outdoor  paint.  It looked, um...  ...well, it looked lame.  I have no pictures of the before or during, so you'll have to take my word for it.

I then used my selected colors, orange, pink, green and yellow (all which could be proceeded with the word "neon").  and painted large polka dots around the poles.  The tops I painted with slanted stripes. One top I painted with pink, and one with green.  The colors were sample indoor paints.  They were only $2.50 for a half pint.  After all that I sealed it with outdoor paint.

It looks as though Dr. Suess visited our house, and I love it!

So for $20 and 3 hours, I got a little piece of happiness every time I'm doing one of my chores.