Consolidated Kansas

[checoukan]

BRRRRR wish the warm weather would come back. Lost one of my blue/red oe's this am.

She was fine last nite at 10pm, when I did my last check, don't know what happened. Oh, well guess that is the way it goes. Should be having some baby rosecombs wedsnesday

Thees will be out of my newest trio, and plan on showing some this fall. Got to get some conditioning pens built. Everything will be better then, cause I WILL have my new barn! Got to go get kids.

 

[Trish44]

Danz, I admire your abilities & tenacity in working on your house. I'm sure it will be nice when you're done, but it all has to take time & resources. There is a lot I would like to do with this house, but we borrowed quite a bit of money when we refinanced it last year to do the siding, windows, & central heat & air. I just am not able to get up on ladders to paint on the 2nd floor level any more & DH hates to paint, so I talked him into doing the siding when we replaced all the wood windows with vinyl. These people who built this house did a lot of weird things that makes you really wonder about them. I personally would not have put wood windows in a house that has so much cement in it, there is way too much humidity & the window frames ended up rotting. If you can picture it, the house is built into the hill & is underground on 3 sides on the bottom level so that the front of the house is the only place you can see out on that level. When you go into the backyard then you're actually on the 2nd floor level of the house & the back door opens into our bedroom on the 2nd floor. It's called a berm house & there aren't that many of them around. They have a harder time appraising the house for that reason since there aren't many to compare it to. Anyway, the whole front of the house is pretty much all windows for passive solar. They tried at first I think to use a solar water heating system, but it didn't work out. They also tried to only heat with the wood stove they had here, but had to add central heat & air after all, which we just had to replace because it was 20 years old & needing to be updated for more efficiency. In the winter if the sun is shining it stays pretty decent on the lower level because the windows in front heat the cement walls & help keep the heat in, but then when it gets dark it gets cold. Tonight it's going to be cold so I will have to start up a fire in the wood stove, which we also replaced with a new one a couple years ago with a more efficient one. There are some things in the house that do worry us because the house is built on a cement slab & not a foundation & there is plumbing under there, I worry about the cement walls & moisture coming through them, & they did take shortcuts on some things here, some of them are outright ridiculous. We had to tear out the shower upstairs completely at one point to get to plumbing that was leaking through to the ceiling in the kitchen downstairs & found out that they had jerry-rigged the plumbing there. The plumber just shook his head about that one. I recently had an electrician here to see about updating some breakers & wiring & he couldn't believe how the wiring was done to the garage from the house & wasn't even sure how he could do what we were asking to be done with the way the walls were. He didn't call us back to give us an estimate & we didn't hear from him again. Oh well, maybe I'll call out another one some day & see what their opinion is about how we can work around the things that were done. I know that with any house you buy unless you build it new & you oversee the work yourself you're going to have things that come up that were done by other owners & you always end up fixing something or doing something over. In my very first house I bought when I was young the people who sold it to us didn't hook up the duct work to the furnace. The heat just rose up through the walls & there was horrible condensation. The walls got all moldy & then we got to looking & found out they never hooked up the duct work. There were duct vents in the floors, but nothing hooked up to them. The wood windows rotted & we had to replace all the windows in that house. Once the ducts were hooked up everything dried up, but I had to clean up the mold & paint the walls in the house, what a mess. That was my first experience with house ownership, a big lesson it was.

 

[rittert3]

I've posted a for sale/ trade ad but I'm listing as pick up/ meet up only soo... If anybody wants OEGB eggs (Millie, Millie/Spangled X) I should start getting them any day now and I'm going to let them go for .25 ea under 7 days old and turned twice daily. Also later on this spring I will have coturnix quail. I should have 6 week olds starting ~May 23rd for sale at 1.50 each and will have eating eggs, hatching eggs, and occaisional started (6 wk old) quail after that. The first batch will be Mostly A&M hens and dark, red, and norm. Tux cocks. Every thing after that (for this year) will be out of A&M males and Asst. Tux. hens. I'm wanting barred, crele, spangled, or BBS OEGB eggs and would work out a trade for them. On another note I've had my trio of OEGB for 4 days and no eggs, I "spiked" their scratch with cayanne this morning hope to kick start them but I'm just hoping it's not something I'm doing. Their setup right now I have to handle them twice a day because they are in a large rabbit cage in a shed at night and I've put them in a run durring the day yesterday and the day before. I left them in today because it's so windy and cold and the run has little shelter. I also clipped 1 hens toe nails today because she has crooked toes and they were way over grown and dipped her and the roos feet in veggie oil again (the other hen has looked clear all along so I didn't do her this time. Anyway is it partially the handling that's keeping my hens from laying? (I know that OEs are fairly poor layers anyway and the season is probably having some effect but I wouldn't think they'd completely stop.)

 

[chicken danz]

So this thing is finally back up. I haven't accomplished a thing all day. Marshmallow won't come out of the dog house again. I have no idea what is wrong now. I was going to call the vet but had a call from my sister and it got too late. I may haul the pups back in again and hope that gets her moving. It is plenty warm out there so she should be getting up. She was doing so good yesterday. Ugh! Dumb dog. She won't even get up for milk or food. I just fed her a half pound of hamburger and she only lifted her head for it and reluctantly at that. Crazy dog! I just don't understand what is going on.
DH is working nights so I haven't bothered him with it today. Why can't this be simple! If it were some mutt running the street she would have pups and they would be fine and so would she.
I am so discouraged at this point.
Yes I love Property brothers. I don't watch too much of HGTV any more because it seems I seem the same old house hunters and house hunters international over and over. But i love what Property Brothers do to those homes. Of course their budget is a lot larger than mine to do work.

 

[HEChicken]

Trish44, I really enjoyed reading about your berm house. That is something my DH dreams about - building his very own "earth sheltered" house. We are currently real estate shopping and I suggested we get land and finally get around to building the house of his dreams but he is concerned it is such an eclectic type of house that our market, should we ever want to sell in the future, would be limited. So I guess we're going to stick to more conventional houses (hopefully with a little land accompanying them).

 

[checoukan]

I've posted a for sale/ trade ad but I'm listing as pick up/ meet up only soo... If anybody wants OEGB eggs (Millie, Millie/Spangled X) I should start getting them any day now and I'm going to let them go for .25 ea under 7 days old and turned twice daily. Also later on this spring I will have coturnix quail. I should have 6 week olds starting ~May 23rd for sale at 1.50 each and will have eating eggs, hatching eggs, and occaisional started (6 wk old) quail after that. The first batch will be Mostly A&M hens and dark, red, and norm. Tux cocks. Every thing after that (for this year) will be out of A&M males and Asst. Tux. hens. I'm wanting barred, crele, spangled, or BBS OEGB eggs and would work out a trade for them. On another note I've had my trio of OEGB for 4 days and no eggs, I "spiked" their scratch with cayanne this morning hope to kick start them but I'm just hoping it's not something I'm doing. Their setup right now I have to handle them twice a day because they are in a large rabbit cage in a shed at night and I've put them in a run durring the day yesterday and the day before. I left them in today because it's so windy and cold and the run has little shelter. I also clipped 1 hens toe nails today because she has crooked toes and they were way over grown and dipped her and the roos feet in veggie oil again (the other hen has looked clear all along so I didn't do her this time. Anyway is it partially the handling that's keeping my hens from laying? (I know that OEs are fairly poor layers anyway and the season is probably having some effect but I wouldn't think they'd completely stop.)

Rittert--I imagine the process of new home, new people, and the cold hav effected the birds. I have blue/reds, and brown/reds, and I am only getting an egg from a couple of pens, once every couple of weeks. The cold just has a "no egg" effect on the hens. Now if you put them under lights, they may start laying, but at this time, I really would not expect many eggs until later in the spring when the sun is up longer.

 

[Trish44]

OK, Hawkeye, here are some photos of the new bunnies. The first one is of Baxter with his two new girlfriends, I haven't figured out names for them yet.



The next one is of Benjamin, my new chinchilla bunny, I'm looking for a girl chinchilla for him.



This is the cage I was working on yesterday putting on the frame & tray. The other cage will bolt to this one & have a tray under it also & will be stacked on top.



Then you were asking me about the free cage I got, so I took a pic of it also, it needs paint when it gets warmer, it had been sitting outside. I would like to figure out how to put a better tray under this one, but haven't figured it out yet, for now it's just rigged. Anybody got any ideas?

 

[Trish44]

IVY, I took a couple pics of Blackie while I was out there, it was cold & he wasn't too cooperative so they're not the best, but you can maybe get a better idea about him than the other pics I had.



You can see the igloo dog house in there that the dogs will eventually need, but for now these guys need it. You can see the two Lavender girls in front of Blackie.

 

[sharol]

We are shameless about asking for pictures around here, aren't we?

OMG, Danz!

I I know where your paint is! It ran off with my sideboard!

Now I know you have had a week from hel* there, but it sounds like things are improving. No REAL pressure here, but if Marshmallow is starting to go out a little more maybe it's time for some puppy pictures?

 

[tweetysvoice]

OMG Trish, those are some of the cutest bunnies!! I love bunnies. Up until about a year ago I always had at least one. Boo was my last one and she died at like 8 years old. She was a house rabbit, trained in the litter box, but hated being out of her cage. We'd drag her out and she'd hop right back in. The last half of her life she didn't even have a door on the cage cuz we knew she'd never leave! LOL