August 28th… Today will be a door hanging day at the barn!!!

After we run a few small errands this morning, we will settle in on making the doors of the barn. We will hang one front rail after removing some of the 2x6’s placed to keep square as we were building the barn mainframe early on and then we'll manufacture the two doors to get the barn closed in. We are definitely looking forward to closing everything in, especially after last night when the coyotes seemed to be in the back yard, as they screamed and yapped after a kill out in the field just beyond the tree line. l'd say that would make it about 50 to 75 yards from the house. I sure hope it wasn’t one of the cute little fawns we’ve seen this summer, especially Deer-Deer’s fawn. (Deer-Deer has been coming into our yard for two years now and has been especially serious about visiting with her fawn to eat grass and visit the pear tree in the backyard) Anyway, we’ll be glad to have doors on everything so it is closed up tight at night. Everything has chicken wire around it and every place near the ground, it's doubled both inside and out, but solid doors and boards are much more secure……especially with a pack of hungry coyotes when they can see a chicken, let alone smell them.

It makes you wonder if that is what has happened to a few of the chickens and our one duck that definitely disappeared early this summer. Perhaps the coyotes linger around the fringes of the undercover on the perimeter of the yard during the day and if one of the chickens or ducks venture too close, they grab them and are gone off into the brush in a split second. We’ve never seen any evidence of that by finding feathers or hearing a commotion though, but who knows?

Anyway, hopefully, later today we should have updated pictures to show you all. The barn nears completion outside and we are also doing little cosmetic things inside that no one realizes takes as long as they do to perform. We will show you the inside of the loft later today also. It needs to be dunged out, swept and it is nearly completed then. (except for the doors and a plywood wall to separate it from the office.) Soon we are going to begin the little expansion area we are building for the bunnies, It will be on the back side of the barn, toward the road and will have an outside entrance door leading into it. We thought it wouldbe much better to segregate the bunnies into a room which we could control, rather than have them in the direct outdoors this winter, where we would have to carry feed and everything which will surely be an adverse condition to deal with. In their own building, we can control the temperature (to some degree), house the feed and have ready access to water all winter long and not worry about an animal upsetting the hutch to get at the bunnies. We will build a wall system to hold all the pens in an orderly fashion. It will be nice.