wWe finally had time to go get our chickens on Sunday, we ended up with two standard sized chooks a Bluebelle and a Columbian Blacktail. We have named them Wigwig (smaller grey hen) and Homer (larger black hen)...

They are getting used to us and being picked up and handled, Wigwig is pretty laid back and quite likes being picked up, Homer however is boss chicken and it a bit more unsure of us.

Rich even made me a seat next to the coop to save me having to sit on the concrete! We picked up the cast legs from a carboot sale the other week for £8 and the seats made from scaffolding plank off cuts.

Im totally fascinated by these two chooks, I've never had any kind of birds before, they are totally different from any other sort of pet, I could ramble on and on and bore you with endless pics so I'll stop here!

Ok just one more, the moment Stella was introduced...

...one massive squawk from Homer and Stella had to go and hide in the house, now she just sits further up the path giving Rich and I the stink eye when we go near the chickens!

Oh and if you where wondering about the names, they are named after villages in Shropshire near where we grew up.

So chickens, anyone who followed our old blog will know we have been talking about chickens on and off for 8 or 9 years now but ever time it looked like we were going to take the plunge something would come up meaning the money put on one side would end up spent on something than needed fixing on one of the cars or the house! Anyway I sort of given up until I spotted this cute coop on eBay and only up the road from us too!

So I manage to win it for a great price and we picked it up from a very nice chap who even through in some chicken feed and grit he had left after his birds where foxed!

Of course it was a little worn as it was secondhand and needed all the wood treating to refresh the weather proofing, incidentally my neighbours thinks its hilarious that all the wood work in our garden is painted the same colour, they think Im super OCD or something, actually I bought way to much blue paint when we did the shed so rather than fork out for a different colour when I have a tin and a half left everything is now blue! The up side is it is now quite hard to tell what we have built out of old pallet wood and whats new (the shed..the sheds new...literally the only time we've spend money on something new, everything else is made by Rich out of gash wood!).

Of course nothing is ever simple and despite actually having a usable coop we needed to fox and rat proof it and more importantly get in level, not easy when your entire garden is on quite an extreme slope likes our is. So that meant more digging out of lawn to make a patio for this to go on.

I managed to get the grey slabs for free from gumtree and the bricks are left overs from doing the shed base a few years ago (also free off Bath Freegle) so its only cost us the time to dig the end of the lawn out. This should hopefully be enough to deter the foxes and rats burrowing into the coop, that and the rodent killing machine we live with who has taken it apone her self this summer to put a significant dent in the local population. God knows that she'll think of chickens!

So the coops done and ready to go, the little patio will look better once everythings settled in a bit, I've already planted a row of french lavender at the end of the lawn and we used the soil dug out the level the lawned area a bit too.

Of course the minuet we finished the coop we both ended up with a load of jobs and orders coming in plus a planning proposal to submit so we haven't had the time to go buy the actual chickens yet!! But they are coming soon…. failing that I will just have to make some cardboard cut-outs at which point the neighbours really will think we are mental!

One of the projects we are working on is trying to clear our garage to make way for a forthcoming huge project (depended on planning permission!). Anyway one of the things we've had crammed in there for ages are the second hand victorian pine doors to replace our horrible 80's white chipboards ones, we bought them years ago then never got round to actually doing anything with them. As they had spend several years in a damp garage they had grown a fine crop of black mould, but several hours in the sunshine with a large amount of bleach on them sorted that out pretty quick.

It then took days of sanding to even the colour out and to tidy up the wood, at some point these doors have been chemically stripped (not by us) this has left the wood in a bit of a state which might be why then ended up at the wood reclamation yard in Bristol and why we picked them up super cheap! Once they where smooth enough and Rich had cut them to fit our door frames, in one case having to add wood to one door which wasn't quite wide enough we got them hung then came the job of waxing.

The wood was so dry by this point is just sucked up the wax meaning we used loads but they now look lovely. Luckily we had also bought second hand brass door knobs and latches from car-boot sales a few years ago, amazingly I managed to remember where I had squirrelled them away and after taking the latches apart and cleaning them up and greasing everything they now work great and have that slightly battered look that seems to characterise our cottage!

We're really happy with how they came out, Rich did an amazing job of cutting and making them fit (not easy as none of the frames where square!), but they look good now.

Another job off the list! Just the doors upstairs to sort out now!