Freezing temperature not withstanding, I set to work on the chicken-house-from-recycled-materials bright and early last Saturday. It was a beautiful, clear morning, and since the wind was calm, the cold wasn’t difficult to take. Within a couple of hours, the temperature was in the 50s.

The first order of business was to frame the human-door end of the house. I used more scrap 2x6 material for that. Next, I cut and installed three purlins across the rafters. The purlins were roughly 1x6, although some boards were flitch sawn, so they followed the curves of the tree that provided the lumber. I needed roofing metal in pieces about 5 feet long, so I headed back to the pushed-in shed with a crowbar and brought several long pieces up to the barn to cut. My el-cheapo power sheet-metal shears made the cuts, although the old steel roofing is corrugated so it wasn’t as quick as it might have been. I used six pieces of roofing, and it went on without a hitch.

With the roof on, my attention turned to the human and chicken doors. Since this was supposed to be a project that used things we had on hand, my first task was to locate sufficient hinges. It took a while, but eventually, I found a box of old garage door hinges in the barn’s loft and picked out five. Next, I cut and hung the doors. I used an old piece of machinery chain to hold the chicken door open and an old homemade steel handle for the human-door latch.

The finishing touches, other than painting, included cutting and installing 1x4 and 1x3 material for the corner trim and knocking together a perch inside the house. I also cut 4-inch diameter hand holes for outside access to the nesting boxes. I haven’t created the “doors” for those yet, but I will soon.

Since the Kubota loader tractor is even more buried this week than last week, I decided to try something unconventional to move the chicken house to the chicken yard. I know the folks at Polar Trailer  won’t recommend using their heavy-duty tandem trailers as jacks and house-moving dollies, but I can tell you that the trailer performed flawlessly as the primary tool for moving this 700-pound house.

Within minutes of setting the new chicken house, the hens were curious. Within an hour they had begun to claim it. During chores this morning, I heard a hen laying an egg in it. I can’t wait to paint both the chicken house and Mulefoot pig house … green with red roofs and white trim. Hopefully I’ll have at least one additional warm day to get that done this season.

Photos courtesy of Kate Will.

Lingering scent of skunk not withstanding, I was up bright and early last Sunday to see how far I could get with the chicken-house-built-from-scraps project I started Saturday.

The house’s base was constructed with 2X6 dimensional lumber and ¾-inch plywood. It was an entrance ramp in its former life, after all. We made the nest boxes with some ½-inch plywood (painted green on one side), some once-lovely spruce molding, and slats that once decked a pallet. I used exterior-grade “drywall” screws and roofing nails to do the nest-box fastening.

The first step on Sunday was to attach the nesting box structure to the floor with a couple of 2x4 cleats screwed to both the floor and the nest box. Next, I attached a 4x8 sheet of ¾-inch plywood (green paint side out) to the back of the house. I screwed it to the edge of the platform and the nest box, and I built a non-conventional 2x6 frame for the back wall and attached it to the floor and the back wall. You might be wondering why I am using 2x6 lumber for the framing … it is simply that we have about a ton of lovely used 2x6s, 2x8s and 2x12s stacked in the barn … and not a single full-length 2x4 in sight.

I found two matching storm windows stashed in the corner of the barn’s loft and framed them fairly conventionally into the front wall before screwing the works to the platform. With top plates and rafters in place, I installed more of the green-painted plywood on the end wall where the nest boxes are located. By the time evening set in, I had the front wall sided with green plywood, too.

All that’s left now is to side the end opposite the nest boxes, frame the human door and install it, install perches, build the chicken door and ramp, and roof it. With any luck I will accomplish that next weekend … and hopefully it will be warm enough to do a little painting, too.

Part 3 of this adventure will hopefully appear early next week.

Photos are once again courtesy of my sweet bride Kate Will.

Last Saturday, after moving the Mulefoot pig house to the pigs’ paddock, I noticed that we hadn’t put much of a dent in the pile of lumber and other miscellanea in the barn. I was considering spending the rest of the day sitting and watching the pigs, chickens and cattle, but Kate wondered whether I might spend the time more productively by building, or at least starting, a chicken house.

I had tripped over the remnants of a wooden ramp (that once connected the mudroom door with the garage) enough times that I decided to use it as the base upon which to build the structure. Of course, the bulky piece was wedged between the box blade on the Kubota’s 3-point hitch and the barn foundation. After a bit of jockeying and levering, I managed to free the platform and tipped the heavy wooden structure up on edge. This would have been uneventful if the terriers and I didn’t just happen to be staring face to face with a couple of startled skunks who had been huddled beneath it.

After a quick assessment of the situation, I decided to lower the platform to the ground before taking the skunks’ fury full-force in the face. I was so hurried that I trapped Woodrow, the Cairn terrier beneath the structure, right along with them. Knowing that Kate would get after me if I let Woodrow battle two skunks alone, I lifted the platform again, narrowly missing the aromatic spray as I propped it with a stick. Woodrow, in a rare moment of obedience, headed out of the barn on my heels.

The scent wasn’t altogether unpleasant at first. It had tinges of musk, onion and other sulfur-containing compounds. As its power dissipated somewhat, and my over stimulated olfactory nerves calmed down, the smell was, well, very skunky.

Since I really wanted to get the chicken house started, I went back into the barn with a 12-foot-long stick. I peeked over the box blade. No skunks. After a bit of investigating and poking, I discovered that the skunks had moved to the space behind the old Allis-Chalmers combine pickup, left leaning against the wall by the farm’s previous owner. In spite of the smell, I horsed that old piece of ramp outside and set to work.

The first task was to spray some of that de-skunking solution on the underside of the ramp to make the work bearable. And it did.

Kate and I managed to install four short legs beneath the platform and cobble a nest box together before it became too dark to see. By the time we packed up the tools, Lucy the Westie and Woodrow had visited the skunks’ new hideout often enough to wear the badge. Luckily, we had plenty of that magic de-skunk formula left and gave them a good going over. It worked again.

Part 2 coming tomorrow, hopefully .

Photos courtesy Kate Will.

Last Saturday was one of those days when I woke up knowing exactly what I was going to do. I had been mulling pig shelter designs for the past couple of weeks … this mulling usually takes place around 2:07 a.m. when the dogs join the local coyote chorus and wake me up. What I decided on was a low, floorless shed that would be relatively easy to move around and that could be stuffed with straw for our little Mulefoot pigs to make into whatever kind of bed they desired.

During one of those sleepless early morning sessions, I mentally inventoried all the used lumber accumulated and left behind by the farm’s former owner. My initial reaction to all the wood was negative … the stacks are messy, and I loathed the idea of removing them from the barn and burning them. But that particular sleepless morning, I realized that we had everything in the barn that I would need to build the pig palace … everything except the roofing, that is. But as luck would have it, the sagging metal-roofed shed that the insurance company made me push in (it was a liability hazard, don’t you know) was still in a heap inside its limestone wall foundation, and most of the 12-foot tin roofing panels were relatively intact.

In a nutshell, this pig house began with a topless shipping crate turned upside down. I cut away part of the front framing to make room for the opening and clad it with some exterior-grade plywood I found … it was painted green on one side, so I installed it green side out. I screwed three purlin-like affairs to the bottom of the crate (roof side) to support and provide purchase for the metal roof. After careful consideration, I decided that 6-foot-long pieces of roofing would be ideal. I used this as an excuse to purchase my first power sheet-metal snips. They only had an el-cheapo version at Tractor Supply, so try as I might to add another Milwaukee tool to my chest, I paid less than $50 for a more or less disposable version. It worked just fine though, and who knows how many times I will really need to cut a lot of sheet metal.

Kate gave me a hand with this project, and she was invaluable as an extra set of hands, photographer, general morale booster and moving contractor. Since I haven’t had the Kubota loader tractor out of the shed for a while, it is kind of buried … lazy old me didn’t want to un-bury it to move the completed pig house to the pig paddock. So with Kate’s help again, we tipped the entire house onto a little foldable garden cart called the Fold-A-Cart and even though the house’s weight caused the cart's tires to compress to almost flat, we rolled the shelter into place in no time.

After stuffing the house with straw and placing the pigs’ dog-crate inside, the growing Mulefoot hogs began to investigate. By the time the temperature had dipped below freezing, they were nestled, four-abreast, inside the dog crate, inside their new house, with the straw all neatly arranged.

Who ever heard of building a palace for $49.99 and a couple of boxes of fasteners? In time, we plan to freshen up the green paint and paint the roof with Rustoleum … Kate wants the roof to be red. What do you think?

I’ve acquired a concrete corbel. I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do with it; right now it sits in one of the gardens and it just might end up staying there, filling up a hole where nothing is growing at the moment. I didn’t purchase the corbel; someone else had set it out for the trash.

Yes, I admit it, I’m a trash collector. I pick up junk that no one wants, and sets out on the side of the road for the garbage trucks. “Junque" is the word I prefer – ok, so it’s pronounced the same as “junk,” but it looks better ... more chic; less trashy maybe. And admitting I collect it is actually not much of an admission because everyone knows it. Even my boss, who used to laugh and scoff at the idea of picking up stuff by the side of the road, will come back from a job site with something in hand; a door from a barn, a piece of statuary or pottery the client didn't want anymore – all sorts of stuff. Sometimes the junque he brings me is even too junky for me and it ends up in the dumpster, and sometimes he'll tell me there's junk in the dumpster, and I should go take a look. He’s the one that brought me the corbel ... along with a couple of pots for his wife, and an only slightly rickety, but otherwise in good condition Adirondack chair for another co-worker.

My friend calls this junque "Ju-ju," and it is usually prefaced with the adjective "good" when she speaks of it. She has alerted me to it's presence by phone announcement, like some Blue-Light Special coming over the intercom at K-Mart, "Good ju-ju on the corner of Cherry and Superior - you better get there quick," which means she's already picked through it. There are certain things I always look for, and can not resist: any type of container that I can use as a planter, old wooden furniture, and solid wood paneled doors – a bonus if the fancy old iron hinges and doorknobs are still attached. My door collection is a running joke with my husband, Keith. He says the doors are cluttering up his garage, and wonders what I am going to do with them all? I don’t know; someday I’ll find a use for them ... maybe. Until then they’re not taking up that much space.

I rarely visit yard sales or flea markets; it’s just not the same thrill as finding something that’s already been discarded, and then dragging it home. As my daughter, Shelby once said, "Mom, yard sales are just Ju-Ju with a price tag." Junque is free; free is good.

Hard-good materials are often the greatest expense in garden projects. Brick, stone, and concrete are pricey. Add a few pieces of garden ornament, and the bill gets even larger. High costs can be avoided by using recycled materials: old bricks, broken concrete, even pieces of curbing. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of discarded old bricks edge my gardens. Wooden furniture, pottery, an old farming implement, (my ninety year old neighbor says it's a potato planter), eventually made it out of the garage or basement and into the yard – much to my garage-space impaired husband’s relief.

I’ve used some of these collected pieces of trash as a solution to a problem area of the yard. What’s the quickest way off a side-door stoop? When you’re a kid, it’s not down the steps; it’s jumping off the side – right into a small patch of asparagus, chives, and parsley. This little add-on to the main vegetable garden not only created a nice landing zone for the girls jumping off the stoop in order to cut across the backyard, the ninety degree angle from one garden to the next was difficult to mow.

I used a slated wooden piece, the two halves held together with a strip of rubber sandwich-board style. (I have no idea what its original purpose was – I just picked it up off the side of the road because it looked interesting.) Keith painted it white, and I secured the piece into the ground with landscape staples and used an old porch newel as the corner piece. The “picket fence” stops the girls from jumping off the stoop and into the asparagus patch. Broken concrete pavers and pieces of old curbing, with the cracks between filled with sand, dubs as faux flagstone, takes care of the hard-to-mow angle, and makes a nice place a place to set potted plants.

This spring’s junque project was my daughters’ idea. They wanted a secret garden, and drew a plan to turn our 2/3 acre ravine into a wondrous, enchanted place with stone paths leading to hidden garden rooms, multi-tiered waterfalls, and a tree-house with enough turrets to rival Ludwig’s Castle.

What they got was a 12 x 12 corner of the ravine under a maple tree. This consists of a “flagstone” sitting area made from broken concrete pavers fitted together, surrounded by divisions of hosta, lady’s mantle, black-eyed susans, and daylilies. The top of a bird bath missing its base, sets on an over-turned pot. An American elderberry is planted in a retaining wall made with a semi-circle of brick that was once part of an old well I dragged home, and a Gro-Lo fragrant sumac cascades down the slope. A permanently open wrought-iron “gate” was made from the two separated halves of a corner plant stand that I dismantled, and welcomes one through the entrance. The border is lined with boulders from a neighbor’s father’s quarry. Cannas and potted annuals fill out the area until the perennials fill in.

Plans to expand the small garden are set for next year ... or as soon as we find another piece of junque to add to it. The whole garden cost nearly nothing – even the plants were free; divided or moved from other areas of the yard. The rewards of seeing my girls work together to come up with a plan, watching my youngest, Shannon, as she helped plant with me, and spending an afternoon with Shelby at local antique markets scouting out a bench, (the garden’s only expense: $15.00), was priceless.

So next time you come across some junk set out as trash, stop and take a look. Ponder how it could be used in your garden. Can’t come up with a plan on the spot? Take it home and ponder some more. Store it in your garage until your spouse threatens to set it out for the garbage truck, and if you still can’t figure out what to do with it, send it my way. One person’s trash is another woman’s junque.