Prepping The House, Cars & Coop For Winter-
With winter just around the corner next week we are wrapping up the prepping phase for winter.
We have temperatures dropping 20 degrees tomorrow night, with lows in the low 30's, highs in the low 50's. It's supposed to be around 70 today.
In our winter prep we include both of our cars. Recently they have both been waxed, much needed. We added new wiper blades (Costco's great deal!), I put in a car size spare blanket, ice scraper/snow sweep. It does snow here on occasion. Good to do early when the weather is nice. Dave cleaned up his work bench in the garage today. No big projects looming, that we know of.
With the house we've been re-caulking windows. Dave had rinsed off some spider webs on a window in the summer and I found there was actually some water on the
inside of the window sill. Not a good idea. We installed new windows about 10+ years ago, since the old ones were pretty well toast. To say this house had little insulation when we bought it(attic and windows) is an understatement! We both caulked the new windows really well. After 10 years it was time for a refresh and so Dave re-did all the windows again. No ladders for me with a brace on my arm! Caulking keeps the cold weather and helps the house stay cooler in the summer. We already put the vegetable garden to bed. Sad looking but that's it, just an empty space. We added more compost to the cold frame to break down over the winter. It's kind of cute that one of the annual flowers that went into the compost pile is actually still alive!
One of the things I always do is clean off and cover up our garden work bench with clear plastic to protect it from the elements. We store the tools in the garage for easy access if we need them. I repainted the bench early this summer since the wood stain was pretty well shot. We bought it right after we bought this house since the deck was fairly small, but we needed some kind of work space. It's held up really well, it just needed a fresh coat of paint. We already closed the foundation vents. New furnace filters, extra batteries, and water jugs. I'll empty the rain barrel soon since it freezes.
For the coop Dave already added the lower window to cover up the bottom portion of the coop. It got spattered with mud during our 1" record rain fall recently, so he cleaned it up today, here's the before shot, no after sorry-
It replaces the hardware cloth in the winter. Late tomorrow, or weather depending, I'm going to cover the screen top of the coop main door-
We'd had a couple of cold nights and didn't have any clear plastic on hand so David covered it with a black garbage bag. I took that down when the weather warmed up again, since the weather has been crazy! We use the deep litter method in the coop and it worked amazingly well. David cleaned the coop out a two weeks ago, the pine shavings/poo went to the city compost. They finally added compost totes to our garbage service this year and it's been great! We have built up the soil level so much over 10 to 12 years that we can't really add a whole lot more to it. So we either give the pine shavings away to our kids or it goes in the compost tote. I touched up the paint today on the coop since there was a few spots that needed it. Luckily we had some paint left, since it was the old house trim color. I still like it!
Before
After-
This is possibly the last weekend of real warm weather, as far as I can tell. Time for these kinds of outside jobs, so we get them done fast. Dave mowed and stored the hoses, covered the water spigots with their styrofoam caps. In the next day or two we will lay out the big industrial, exterior extension cord that we use to power the coop, including the heated water and the two lights. We have a reptile light that we use on the upper part of the coop for a little extra heat when it's really really cold. We also have infrared heat lamp that's hardwired in. I don't really use either of those until it's in the low 20's, or lower. We always add extra pine shavings when it gets really cold and that seems to help quite a bit. I am proud to say that none of my chickens have ever had major frostbite over all the winter's that we have kept them. They can go out in the cold weather and there's enough ventilation to keep them healthy. They all seem to deal with the cold very well. We will put up the "sun room" (to photo) when it gets colder, for extra space in the rain and snow. All made from recycled materials and custom built by Dave to fit onto the coop. I'll keep an eye on the forecast. In a year or two we may need to re-build the coop. Time will tell. When you design your own coop (after tons of research) there's always things that can be tweaked.
Affiliate Earnings Reveal!
I was reading an article today that some "Instagrammers" now call themselves "Bloggers", but don't have an actual blog. They post photos with a few sentences on Instagram. Not much writing involved. Sometimes it's about making money and that's all. I know there are some bloggers who are young, competitive, have no families and work 24/7 at a job
and they blog. They make quite a bit of $, but I just can't do that. I sit at a computer all day at work and don't want to do that at home. My eyes object as well. This post today took several hours, for instance, not counting photos and editing. I read this post today and it is a FASCINATING read
The Dark Side Of Blogging
If you've been following this blog for a while you have probably seen my
Amazon affiliate statement and the various items that you can click through, and buy to help support this blog. I get a tiny percentage. It's been really interesting to see what did, and didn't happen, with Amazon. If you look below you can see what my total earnings have been for the last 90 days, and well, it's pretty pathetic-
Yep, $1.72. They owe me about $10.00, but won't pay me til it hits $20.00. Nice. Ironically I actually have made more through product click-through at
Hometalk. I was actually shocked when I got an email saying that I had earned $57.00. It was my first payment. It works like this- people read my DIY projects on
Hometalk. When I list specific items, like my back splash material in my kitchen, they can go to the bottom of the post, then buy that item. That goes as a credit towards me and eventually I can make some money doing that. It was actually pretty funny when I got an email from them saying that I had
earned money. I thought it was a scam, but it wasn't. Here's a screenshot from
Paypal-
I have posted 11 DIY projects, taking about an hour each. So, it's been an interesting experiment. Since I basically don't get any income from this blog I've been writing for years, maybe there's hope. Do you make any money off your blog?
