Tuesday, November 3, 2009

reincarnation

See, we have this...structure...that we built. Or rather, that my husband built. It's been around for a couple of years now. It's nothing fancy, and in fact you might say it's rather crude, but it is a chameleon of a thing. It seems to have an uncanny knack for serving whatever purpose we need it to serve in the moment. Here it is at its birth, when it was a rabbit hutch:



After awhile, we moved the rabbit cages into the barn, and when the ducks arrived, we converted this into a house for them. We cut the legs off, knocked out the solid sides, extended the front by several feet, hung a door and enclosed the whole thing with welded wire. Here they are, not enjoying it:



Shortly thereafter, the ducks turned up their bills at the accommodations and moved out. Conveniently, we had new tenants waiting to take up residence:



All it took was the addition of some roosts and some smaller-weave poultry netting to transform it from DuxHostel to Casa de Pollo. The chickens like it just fine, thank you very much.

Ah, but they'll be moving out soon too. Pretty soon their dee-luxe accommodations will be complete, and they will all be moving into the poultry penthouse, leaving the structure empty once more. Around that time, the goat barn will no longer be co-ed. The boys will be needing their own dorm. As we sat on the porch over the weekend, planning their shelter, we looked over at the rabbit-duck-chicken-hutch-coop...


"I think the goats' shelter could be about that size. The height is fine. It's plenty deep and wide enough too."'

"Okay, then. I'll use that as a guide and build their shelter more or less to those dimensions."

"Wait...why don't we just use that?"

"Hmmm...yeah...the chickens will be moved out. I'll need to fortify it a bit."

"...and put a roof over the whole thing, and pull off the wire and add on some solid walls."

"Done."


Ouila! Maison de Chevres! I can't wait to see what it turns into next.

5 comments:

  1. Very Cool! Hey I didn't know you had rabbits? What do you use them for, fertilizer, meat, fur, or something else?

    It is supposed to be near 80 degrees this weekend...blah. Why can't their be a happy medium between cold/raining and hot/dry?

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  2. The rabbits represent our very first foray into livestock. We use the fertilizer, of course, and we intended to keep them for meat, but after two years of keeping them, we have butchered exactly ONE rabbit. We've actually had quite a few trials in keeping them, and now we're not certain that we want to keep the two we still have. Perhaps I'll write a post about our rabbit misadventures.

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  3. Rabbits, in our experience, have an undeserved reputation.

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  4. I'm thinking the next purpose could be your redneck spa!! What kind of treatments would be available in a former bunny house, duck house, chicken house, goat house...??

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  5. The goats are always happy to give free massages. They'll walk on your back, too, if you like. ;-)

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