We found a chicken coop on Facebook for the low low price of “you have to move it out of our yard.” When I first went to see it, it didn’t seem like that big a deal, but as we measured and planned, the coop seemed to grow. It’s 4×8′ and wouldn’t fit on my friend’s trailer, which meant that we had to rent a trailer and have several friends help with loading it. You could write a joke about the engineer, the architect, and the contractor trying to figure out how to get this coop out of our benefactor’s back yard without hitting their house, garage, or trees. I deeply regret not getting this exchange on video, but at least I have this photo, with Gregory Barnum (the contractor) getting out of the van, having just moved the coop, while Steve Wilke-Shapiro and my husband, Doug Jotzke (the architect and engineer respectively) were still discussing various clearances and angles. It was pretty classic.
We never would have gotten this thing moved (or have been so entertained) without the help of Steve, who is an architect with Silent Rivers, Gregory Barnum of ConcretEquity, and Mike Hildbrand, who is the President of the River Bend Neighborhood association (although he was helping in unofficial capacity!) You won’t find nicer people to work with/neighbors anywhere!
Miraculously, the chicks have survived their first week with us! And they are growing like crazy. Sometimes, I will walk by them an hour later and I swear they’re bigger. They’re super cute, and pretty funny interacting with the kids and trying to hide from the cats. Luckily, the chicken coop is moving here soon, and we will no longer have predators and prey living together!
The good news is the Hatton House came with it’s own architectural salvage in the attic: a huge pile of historic trim, bullseyes, plinth blocks and more. The bad news is that most of our salvage was in very rough shape. I started out pulling pieces that I could scrub down and clean up myself, but I quickly ran out of “quality” pieces and wasn’t too excited about stripping paint out of the detailed carving of the trim we needed to add three new doors as part of adding the first floor bathroom. Fortunately, I found Southpaw Furniture Refinishing in Valley Junction. For $1 per foot, Kevin will soak boards in a stripping bath that pulls most of the paint off even the boards that are paint on bare wood.
We have a great garden here at the Hatton House, but I’ve never really had the time to experiment with the randomness that is our garden. Then someone mentioned to me that you could make simple syrup from lilacs, and make cocktails from it! What what?! So for the weekly Thirsty Thursday that we hosted, I got all excited for syrup! A quick Google search led my to
Hatton House Diaries 