Duck Hutch Tutorial

Our friends have a farm that we visit often. And one day I was discussing with Becky, the farmer's wife, about how we were thinking about getting ducklings. She mentioned how her neighbors have a good set up for the ducks using hutches kind of like rabbit hutches. I asked her if she could set up a time for us to go over to see everything. And I'm so thankful that she did!

We went there the next week and met her neighbor, Heather. She was an older lady who was going through the process of learning to raise ducks and although she would tell you right away she wasn't an expert on them she was quick and willing to share what she had learned already. 

She took us to two pairs of ducks first. Each pair was in their own hutch. The pictures below are of the hutches themselves. She had two hutches on either side of a small garden. And I thought it was brilliant how she had a tub that had a plug to drain as their pool. Then whenever their water was dirty she just pulled the plug and the tub drained down a tube into the garden next to the cages. The best fertilized water ever!! 

She also showed us her brooder box for her ducklings, which were quickly growing. She did it all on plastic grate as well so that the poop falls right below and then every once in a while she just scoops it up and uses it as fertilizer for the garden. For the ducklings she did add a box on one side which had wood chips in it so they could keep warm. There were covers on the top of the box that she would put down at night so the lamp in the cafe would keep its warmth in. Otherwise, during the day she would keep them open for fresh air and sunshine.

 

We had a great time and even saw lots of her chickens too! We walked away with a dozen eggs and lots of knowledge about what our ducklings would need. Thank you Mrs. Heather for all your help!

Needless to say, we went and bought some ducks the next week. We kept them temporarily in the house for two weeks in an old dog crate but the smell started to get pretty bad. So, I pushed my husband a bit and he was able to make us a similar hutch. We still don't have a nesting box for them and since the weather has been a bit chilly we have been keeping them in the dog crate in the garage at night (no water to keep it from getting as smelly) but they are outdoors in their hutch all day. 

I'm writing this a couple weeks after we've had the hutch in effect and I have to say I love it! The only thing we did differently is that because of distance we just have a bucket under the drain to catch the water so no tube is necessary. But the ducks LOVE the water to swim in and their poops falls through pretty good. We used the 1/2 inch plastic fencing as the base and the door cover. We had some old table legs lying around and used those for the legs. The hardest part has been the latches for the door. We used they little key and eye hooks and they seem to work okay, but Ryan had to bend them a little bit to make sure they wouldn't come undone too easily. 

Now, as the ducks are getting older we let them out during the day to walk in the backyard and then we just put them back in their hutch when we go inside. This has been the best and easiest way I have seen to raise ducks in a small area. Hope you have enjoyed seeing what we do here on our residential household farm, ha!

Here are just some pictures of how my awesome husband made the hutch. It's pretty self explanatory but if you have questions just ask below in the comments.

 

 

 

 

 (Putting the door on. It's laying on it's side right now and the door is being placed on the top. We later had to reinforce the beams of the door to help them hold up to all the opening and closing with metal braces.)

 (Here it is right side up)

 

(Added legs on)

 

 (Drilling hole for the drain)

 

 (Added the sides of wood.)

 (All set up right by our garden.)

*Update: It's been about 5 months since we've had our ducks. Our hutch is holding up good. The thin wood we used has warped a little but we kind of knew that was going to happen. Also, we are trying to be consistent to wash off the table legs because their poop is sticking and looking gross on it. But otherwise, the ducks are doing well. They're trained now that when we open the cage in the morning they fly out for the day and we have a pool they can play in in our backyard. They stay out all day and we put them back in at night.

Heather Joy

Book Sling

I finally make one of those book slings that everybody seems to have.  At first I thought that it would be a lot cheaper than investing in another bookshelf, but come time to buy those double curtain rod holders, I might be second guessing that.  But either way it is a super cute and easy way for books not to get destroyed in our house. 

What you'll need to make your own: 

-2 dowel rods, that are pretty thick to support the weight.

-Canvas material, however long you want it to be, but cant be longer than your dowel rods)

-Ribbon, if you want to spruce it up a bit.

I actually had some random couch cushion pillow covers that my mother-in-law gave me and they are a canvas material of some type, so I thought I could finally use them up.  I just cut the largest rectangle I could out of one side.

Then you need to have some test books and figure out how high you want the books poking out.  I didn't want my small books to disappear too.  It's hard to get those little suckers out sometimes when they fall down!

Measure how tall you want it. Remember this number.  Add about 3 inches (which will become the casing for the dowels to go through) Cut off any excess fabric you're going to have.

Fold down and pin the short sides. Sew. Then fold down and pin the long sides (not necessary as this will be turned inside but it still makes it cleaner inside for books not to snag on) and sew.

Here's what it will look like:

Then taking that measurement from earlier, make sure you fold down the long edges enough that when you fold it in half (as if it were hanging) your books will sit as tall as you want them.  If it's too short, fold it in more, if too high then let more out (making sure you still have enough room for the dowel to go through).

Simple sew on the edges, leaving an opening in the middle. Place the dowels through and let your toddler test it out.

"Wow Mom, this is awesome!"

You can add a large ribbon under the casing if you want to and then buy the double curtain rod holders at Lowe's or Home Depot. Hang it up and now you have the perfect reading center for your kiddos!  Now I just need to have my hubby cut down the dowels and it's prefect. Happy book reading and 

God Bless!

Do It Yourself: Sun Shades

Does anyone else have a crappy backyard layout?  I'm just being real and calling it for what it is! I can hear at least a couple people shouting, "amen!" A few years back now, we had our house build in Texas while we were still living in Arizona. I still know that it was God's plan and it's so cool to see his handiwork in getting us to Texas but....let's just say we learned a few things along the way.

We had never had a house built. We learned that we will probably never want to do it again to be honest.  However, one of our complaints was that we saw a printed layout of our house before we moved out but I don't believe they ever even showed us how our house would be situated on that lot. (I know! We should have asked. But lesson learned!) We were getting what we thought was a huge lot. We were in a cul de sac lot and were paying extra because of it so we weren't really worried about the size of our yard. We walked on the lot before we signed the papers and it looked huge!! But, needless to say, we have a stupidly shaped yard. They placed our house so far back on our lot that we have a LONG driveway and long front side yards and well....a stupidly shaped backyard.

We walk right outside our back door and we have our neighbors fence smack in our face. Okay, well maybe it's like 9 feet away...but it's really close people!! With it being SO close most of our concern and problem is with toys and balls being thrown into other people's yard and when your neighbors aren't very friendly and their dogs are mean you don't really get anything back. *Sigh.

We also only have a stub of a patio which is like 2 feet by 3 feet wide. We've wanted to add a large concrete patio slab but after counting the cost we ended up building the shades first and making it have the 'feel' of a patio without the huge expense of a patio.

Plus, we've had these shades in our closet for the last 6 years!! I kid you not! My In-laws were shopping at Costco one time and knew we were searching for a good deal and it was the end of Summer in Phoenix and they got 3 on mark down for us. It was a great deal. Surely we'd use them, right? Well, we finally have these 6 years later and I want to show you how we did it.

My husband went to a local lumber yard and bought some 12 foot cedar posts. He paid a pretty penny and you should too because they are going to take a beating with the winds and the last thing you want is a shade breaking off and flapping dangerously around in a fierce storm.

He also rented a one man auger machine, which in reality takes two people really but that's what it's called. Along with that he got some Quikcrete bags to solidify the posts into.

With everything at hand we looked at the size of the shades and we wanted it to float evenly in the middle between the house and fence. It's been awhile since we put these in but I believe it ended up being about 3 fee we added on each corner. We put it at an angle, so it was slightly higher up on the house.  We had a hard time figuring out how far apart to put the beams. We wanted to make sure we put enough room to be able to have length to tighten as the shade got pulled loose from wind and such but we also didn't want it to be too far apart and not have the shades provide adequate coverage. We didn't want three triangle spots of shade but rather as close to a unified shade as possible. We ended up setting the poles roughly 21 feet apart. As you'll see in the pictures it was enough to keep them from overlapping but we might have been able to get them a foot or two closer. But we're happy with how they turned out.

We used painter's tape on the fence to mark where to dig. Ryan and my brother set off to work digging the first hole.  One thing to note here: make sure you know what your rented equipment can do, otherwise you might end up in a big mess.  Enter mess....Ryan and Darren dug down the drill end really quickly into the ground. Now if the auger you rented had a reverse switch that wouldn't be a big deal but...ours didn't. The guys didn't realize that because of our hard clay based ground (which will be great for holding these poles up, but not great for working with it) they dug down so fast they didn't even give it a chance to pull up any dirt. They pretty much just drilled it into clay and there it was stuck...for the next 3 hours it took all of us to dig it out of the ground.  So if you look really closely you'll see the the base of the the farthest post has a very wide concrete bottom.

 

So after learning from their lesson, they jammed out the last two poled in less than 30 minutes. They dug down about 30 inches my husband said, which is as far as this auger let them go pretty much. We probably would have gone down more if possible but with our hard ground it will (and has) held up fine.  Instead of going so fast with the auger they put it in slowly and let the drill slowly pull out the clay as it went down. They had to pull it back up every so often because it wants to go down much faster than it should. So they drilled a little. Stopped. Pulled it back up, just to clean out the drill and then they put it back in to go down a little farther.

Now that you we had our holes they mixed the concrete bags with the water. While I held the post in the right spot using a level, Ryan was able to fill in all around the pole. It was such a deep hole we really didn't even have to prop up the poles from leaning. We kept checking them periodically but they never even tilted, which was awesome!

 

After your posts are set then you need to add the hardware to the top of the posts. My husband just went to the store and got what he needed. He got a cable tensioner with a hook and some eyes that he was able to mount on the posts. He also got a few wire cable clamps (one for each corner of the shade)  I included some pictures so you can see the hardware and how he mounted them on.




Make sure to leave some slack on the rope and just use those small little nuts to tighten up and hold the extra rope. You need enough to hang on and pull so you can tighten the shade later. You can slowly clip off the excess if needed though, just don't cut too short!!

(This is where you can see that little bolt which holds the extra string up so you have slack to pull when you have to tighten later.)

Once you have the hardware on your post then attach your shades onto the top of the beams.

(This is the main central beam which holds the three shades.)

 (Here is how the attachment looks on one of the side beams, with just one shade attached.)

At this point it's kind of a grab the ladder and hold up where the shade would go on the house and mark where it will look the best. We started with the middle shade because that gave us our control. We wanted the other shades to fit as closely to the middle one as possible.

(A view of the attachment to the house.)

 (Another view of how it's attached to the house.)

The shades are angled slightly, so the mounts are raised a little bit higher on the house versus the posts. It makes it have a more open feel than if they were just flat.

After the middle one was set we started with one side shade at a time and pulled the rope to the best spot so there was as little gap as possible between the shades but we also didn't want them to rub. You can see in this photo the final placement of where the ropes were attached to the house.

After everything was adjusted and tightened we snapped a couple more photos.

 

 

Please note that you need to plan to tighten your shade after a couple days of good wind. The shade will loosen a lot after it finally gets pulled tight by the wind. My husband has gotten in a good habit of after a really bad storm he will tighten them back up again or he just plans to do it during the Summer.

We also added some strings of outdoor lights onto the shades. We just strung them up around the shade hardware and ziptied them onto where they wouldn't slip. We used 3 strands and had a bunch extra so we took off the extra bulbs and stapled it to the back of the last post. So you can't see it from the front at all.

Here are some more pictures to enjoy!

 

Well, I hope this has spurred you on to build your own sun shades. We enjoy the fact that it adds a patio feel without having to pay for the whole concrete slab. We recently bought a picnic table and put it underneath and enjoy our lunch outdoors sometimes now.

God Bless!
Heather Joy

Quiet Book Tutorial: Any figure or object on felt for your quiet books!!

Okay, so here is the money maker.  I've been working on my quiet book pages for awhile now and I have a super big thing about not making them impossibly hard and time consuming but not having them look ugly and lame either.  So, this is my trick of the trade. See the pictures above? See all those adorable dogs that would have taken me forever if I wanted to make felt dogs even remotely close to those? Well, this tutorial will show you how to make them. And after you've learned a whole new world of quiet book making will be open to you. Let's begin:

-Find whatever image you want to make into felt for your books.

-Buy some T-Shirt Transfers.  I got mine on Amazon for a very reasonable price. Note: there are T-shirt transfers designed for light and dark clothes, so make sure you know the difference. I just bought the light colored ones and planned to put white felt behind almost everything.

-Then reverse your image (some things won't matter but this is a MUST for text) because it will be backwards after you complete this process.

-Print them onto the transfer papers. (The sample below is from my zoo page and you can see the text on top is flipped backwards)

-Get your sheet of white felt and iron away!  I felt that this takes quite a bit of time.  You don't want your iron up too hot to burn the felt but that hasn't happened to me yet even when I'm impatient and crank the heat up anyways.  Just take your time and slowly move the iron across until it's good and hot...and then do it some more...and some more....and some more.  You can try lifting the corner once you think it's done.  Peel the whole paper off.

-Then just cut out your shapes.

Now you have perfectly cute people and objects to work into your designs! Here are a couple more pages I've made using this idea. I've also really loved added poems and lots more text on pages than I would have before- no time for cute embroidery in my life.

I created the top poem with this technique. Compare the bottom text I tried to write with a sharpie. Boo! Lessons learned along the way I guess.

Here, I created the frogs as well as the printed song.

These are the farm animals for my barn page.


Well, happy crafting and Blessings to you!

Heather Joy