Well folks its here at last aggy and her able assistant ( me ) have built the hen house finally ,nothing grand or anything just a basic house to keep a few hens in ,
we have aggy's original hens which she brought up north with us and the 12 new hens from grannie annie which i can say have proved to be brilliant and very healthy layers ,so with the 6x4 shed and the little henhouse of aggy's still down in suffolk for most of the time we had to get to work making a building big enough for all,the cold winds and rain up here are something to behold temperatures of -6 and most mornings below zero anyway to contend with and gales up to on one occasion force 9 in a very open spot ( because the dam builders chopped down every tree with green on it) added to the need to get the birds some adequate shelter.
so a searching we did go ,we'd like to give you a few tips on finding pallets first though for those who find it difficult to track them down.first use your eyes as your walking or driving along the roads in your area keep an eye open for building sites.skips or house renovations and a post on freecycle secured us a garden centre with loads to go and aquire at some point also we found a few by driving along to find a restaurant and lo and behold the restaurant was being developed and had pallets which the builders had dumped outside ,not one to miss a chance we popped inside and asked for them (this day was absolutly piddling down with rain) with big smiles we got half a dozen crates which had been used to ship marble tiles , next day we returned with a couple of hammers and a bolster chisel and set to breaking them down, fully loaded the car and left promising to return for any others they had to get rid of( i also coveted some of the broken tiles of 16x16 inch italian marble ) so we waited for the call. and we also went with friends to eat there ." blooming good grub i can tell ya " ,always needing more we got out the yellow pages searching for steel fabricators as this had been a fantastic source ,back down in suffolk i used to get a 40ft lorry stacked high with them delivered " FREE " , but here up north it was a different situation, on being invited to come and see some from one firm we got asked for £30, at first it sounded a no hoper at that price for getting rid of some rubbish pallets for the firm, but no it was a bonus we had a double axle box wagon available and filled it with large pallets some with 10ft posts and 10 pallets with 10x4 and 8x4 plyboard sheets attached .not quality ply but the three ply open cored type similar to shutter board . visions of a shed started to form but this ply would need to be well water proofed for it to last ,paying over the money willingly ( which we found was for the workers Christmas do ) on leaving we got offered a 20ft railway sleeper type lump of wood .miles to heavy to lift uncut so plans are now afoot to go with the chainsaw and make it smaller also securing a call from them to let us know when more pallets are available .
Now living "on" a building site does have its advantages, free bricks for the asking .pallets close at hand ,all manner of goodies to find in the skips,a few free eggs to the site boss "wink " and we have the makings of a great barter system ( aggy even secured a jcb delivered bucket load of nice topsoil for half a dozen eggs lol ) we have our eyes on some sheets of 30 x 8 mtres butyl liner the boys are using to make a massive soakaway for ground water, great duck pond project coming along we hope so watch this space ... oh and we just got the lump of butyl
liner
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August 08, 2008, 20:04