Commercial kitchen

Wolf and I are discussing turning our basement kitchen into a commercial kitchen to open up opportunities for non-cottage act foods. We would offer the kitchen for use for free to other homesteaders.

We would also like to be a centralized place for customers to buy from multiple hobbyists without the huge markup other distribution places charge. Anything handmade or grown would be welcome.

If this sounds interesting to you and you'd be interested in being a consumer or vendor, please email me

Winter prep - check, next up... Spring planning!

With my winter checklist taken care of my mind has moved on to spring planning. I have received a couple of seed catalogs in the mail this week, they have gotten my mind reeling.

First step for the garden is to design it. This house had no garden area to speak of when we bought it. There are a few retaining walls in the front yard not keep the ground from washing away, but it doesn't look like any one ever planted in them. This is where I did my test of tomatoes this year (which I was pleasantly surprised how well they did) but it's not a large enough area for what we want. So, we're going to put the garden on the side of the house and back yard. According to google this space is about 2200sqft! We plan to put a 16'x20' greenhouse next to the house in 2016, and the rest of the garden to the back fence. Here is our satellite shot of our property before we bought it to give an idea of what I'm talking about.

Things I need to figure out:
1) do I want raised beds or in-ground beds?
2) placement of beds
3) deer/dog protection
4) hail protection

1) I think I'm going to do a mixture. There are pros and cons of both and I'm hoping to strike a happy balance. Raised boxes: pros - warm earlier in the spring, easy to amend soil. Cons - gets cooler quicker in the fall, more expensive to start. In-ground: pros - stays warmer later, unlimited depth, low start up cost. Cons - longer to warm up in fall, harder to amend.
I think I'll do a few raised bed near the back fence, and do some in ground beds in the rest. I think I'll outline the in-ground beds with wood and each year add more wood as I amend and build the soil. This will cut out the major start-up costs of raised beds. I plan to leave a couple beds as only in-ground though for fall plants.

2) I really want to design the garden to be visibly pleasing as well as functional. I've been perusing pinterest for potager garden plans and have found a couple I think I'll modify to suit my tastes.

 


3) In the inside of the garden we'll probably just build a small fence to keep the dogs out. Not sure what style yet; wood, wire, etc. On the outside fence we're talking about adding 8ft poles about every 12-15ft and running a couple visible strings a foot apart on them to keep the deer from jumping over.

4) This is the part I'm researching now. So far I'm leaning toward pvc hoops over each bed and using a fabric that I can roll down like I did in our last garden. I like this because I can put the fabric up and down easily in response to weather. I know I took pictures of my system but can't find them anywhere. Here is a pic of someone else's. See how the cloth stays up on it's own? It's great. The trick is getting the ends tight enough.


I want to use this cloth or something similar depending on price. It's a knitted polyethylene that can stand up to hail and storms but lets light and rain through.


I'm hoping this plan will be relatively inexpensive. I've seen a lot of people use hardware cloth but that only protects the top, you still have to wrap the sides with something, and it's way too expensive to cover our large area.

I'll update as plans get finalized.

Prepping for winter part 2

The last couple of days have been beautiful here. Let's see how much I got done on the winter vacation to do list...

1) Another bucket feeder for our chickens. We don't ferment the food in the winter and this will hold a couple of days worth of food.
2) Another automatic coop door for the secondary coop (currently housing our friend's chickens while she is in temporary housing)
I have the door done and it works inside the house but every time I install it outside it doesn't work. To top things off, I think our motor burnt out tonight. The door didn't trigger the lower limit switch for some reason and bounced back up and sat trying to turn when it was at the top of the frame for an hour (we weren't home). I'm going to test it tomorrow and might need to switch out the motor. Hopefully it's just the motor, I have 2 extra of those. I'm worried it's the power board though. That will cost me another $10. :/
3) Figure out how to keep the hose from freezing for the horses water. Currently I fill their tank completely full before a freeze and during the freeze they have enough water (thanks to a tank heater) to last until it's warm enough to defrost the hose again. Problem is you have to dig the hose out from under any snow so it can get sunlight. No big deal if you are living here but when someone is only coming once every 2 days they need water right then. A heated hose is an option but expensive ($80 for 20'). After looking online for suggestions, I've decided to run our hose up over a post that is between the tank and the pump and get a quick disconnect for the hose. This way it will be easy to disconnect the hose from the pump and the water will all drain out on it's own.
4) Setup a heated bowl for the goats. Luckily they don't drink much so the 1 1/2 gallon bowl that's on it's way should be enough.
5) Get a small hay bale for the goats. That should last them all week so they'll only need watered.
I won't have to get the hay bale for the goats until just before we leave. 

Overall I got quite a bit done recently. :)

Web Cams

I got the web cams up and running. 


Here is the chicken cam  and the puppy cam. (sorry puppy cam is done for now)
Enjoy!

You will be prompted for a username and password. Both are "guest". 

Prepping for winter

I've already written about what we do with the animals in winter but as we are coming up on a vacation I've been thinking about how to make things easiest for a sitter. Here are the projects that need to be done before we leave:

1) Another bucket feeder for our chickens. We don't ferment the food in the winter and this will hold a couple of days worth of food.
2) Another automatic coop door for the secondary coop (currently housing our friend's chickens while she is in temporary housing)
3) Figure out how to keep the hose from freezing for the horses water. Currently I fill their tank completely full before a freeze and during the freeze they have enough water (thanks to a tank heater) to last until it's warm enough to defrost the hose again. Problem is you have to dig the hose out from under any snow so it can get sunlight. No big deal if you are living here but when someone is only coming once every 2 days they need water right then. A heated hose is an option but expensive ($80 for 20'). After looking online for suggestions, I've decided to run our hose up over a post that is between the tank and the pump and get a quick disconnect for the hose. This way it will be easy to disconnect the hose from the pump and the water will all drain out on it's own.
4) Setup a heated bowl for the goats. Luckily they don't drink much so the 1 1/2 gallon bowl that's on it's way should be enough.
5) Get a small hay bale for the goats. That should last them all week so they'll only need watered.

With this setup if the dogs aren't here we would only need someone to come by every other day. It's the dogs that would require daily attention. This vacation we have had a friend graciously offer to stay out our house since she'll be off work that week, but the next vacation we won't have that option. We have a fellow farmer in the same town that is interested in trading services. That would be ideal so we don't have to spend a ton of money having someone come over. Hopefully we can find a house or two for the dogs so they won't have to come over every day and the dogs would have more company than just a 10  min visit.

Got to get to work!

Animals in the winter

Winter is here!

Ok, not technically, but we went from beautiful fall days of 68-70 degrees to below freezing temps in one day so it feels like winter is here!

A lot of discussion has been happening on the BYC forum about chickens and cold weather. I figured I'd write a post about how we handle the cold weather and our animals. I can sum up what we do by saying we try to keep things as natural as possible here. An important thing to keep in mind is the lower critical temperature (LCT) of an animal. This is the temperature at which an animal will suffer ill effects and needs additional care including shelter and/or extra feed. Note that does not mean heat. Just shelter and food. Here is some common farm animal average LCTs:
Horse: -15F
Chicken: 12F
Dairy Cow: -22F
Goats: 32F

Goats

I don't really do much for them since they have their usual loafing shed area that is full of straw. The only thing I did was put a piece of wood at an angle in a corner to block the wind a little more since it usually blows from the west and their open side is the south. This gives them a little corner that is free of wind and snow. I feed them in this area and give them a small water dish that is easy to dump and refill if it freezes. A heated water dish for them is on it's way, so they'll have that soon. I have upped their hay in the frigid weather we are having right now (currently 2 deg outside). Despite all the nice straw in the loafing shed, they have been spending the nights in the space under the tack room. Go figure.

Dogs

The pugs barely step foot outside longer than it takes to do their business and if they could get away with it, they wouldn't even do that. Barley will stay outside for a minute when I go out. He'll follow me out to the animals but if I'm not back in a minute he runs back to the house. If it's not below freezing and the sun is out, then Jasmine will go lay in the snow, but on frigid days even she is inside. She has a thick winter coat so she gets hot inside, though so I will usually find her in the laundry room laying right next to the dog door where the cold air is coming in. 

Cats

Rocky stays inside when it's cold. Apollo (the new barn kitten) sleeps in the tack room. He is the only outdoor animal we provide extra heat for. We have 2 lamps with incandescent bulbs shining on his water and bed. It keeps it above freezing in his little area. I don't let him out of the tack room for his usual outdoor time when it's snowy and/or below freezing. I think he's ok with that. 

Chickens

I hear a lot about this topic and have done a lot of reading on it. I get asked a lot about what I do for the chickens when it's cold out. I don't do much. I do not provide supplemental heat or lighting to the birds. I have read that providing heat is worse than not and increases the risk of frost bite. The one thing we did do was put plastic up over the secondary coop's large window to keep the wind and snow out. And it's a good thing we did because even through the small holes we didn't cover there is a dusting of snow in some areas of the coop. We are looking at ideas to block off at least a portion of the run to keep the snow out but so far we haven't found anything feasible, the run is just too large. So for now on subzero days I leave the flocks in the coops simply because they wisely spend their time there any way so I might as well keep the doors shut and the cold air out as much as possible. 

I use a heated dog dish for the main coop and a bucket/nipple system with an aquarium heater for the secondary coop. I feed indoors if there is snow on the ground and I don't do fermented feed in the winter. I do still sprout the peas and lentils for them in the house though. 

I am considering trying to do a fodder system again this winter. I read that 65-68 is the perfect temp and we keep our house around there in the winter so I might be able to do it without getting mold. I would love to give the animals some greens throughout the winter. 

People ask me all the time, "The chickens are ok in this weather!?" Sometimes I find myself drawn in by the concern and seeing all the animals that are receiving supplemental heat and start questioning myself. The internal struggle between doing things naturally and putting my own feelings on the animals starts again. But then as I was sitting on my couch this afternoon I saw some song birds come up to our bird feeder and bare tree and was reminded if they can make it, I'm sure my big fluffy chickens in their down coats will be fine in a nice dry coop!

Free ranging

Since we've had a problem with hawks lately the chickens haven't had any free range time. This evening I decided to sit out with them so they could get a chance to get some of the remaining greens before they're gone for the winter. They were so excited. Even our sick little bantam EE came out. Who can find the kitten?

Of course as soon as I open the chicken run the chickens want out and the goats want in. I have learned to open the back gate of the goat area to let them into the middle pasture. This gives them something new to munch on and distracts them from the chicken run.

Puppies!

The puppies have arrived. Check out their page.. Puppies!

Automatic coop door - more details and pics

What an adventure this door has given me lately!

UPDATE: I had trouble again with the door and started from scratch with a new screwdriver and redoing all wiring. I have written a better step by step instructions on BYC (backyard chickens) that can be found here. I made a few changes so if you want to recreate go to that article. Otherwise feel free to read about all my problems below.

If you don't feel up to tackling this project we now sell them pre-made. You just need to mount it over your current opening and plug it into a timer and you're all set. The door shown in this write-up was my original. I left it because the component are more visible.

Pre-made door

It would work then one night I'd look and it wasn't shut, or one morning I'd get up and go out to feed them and they were still locked up. I took it off and brought it in the house twice trying to fix the problem. First it was the timer, it stopped keeping time. So I put a different timer out there that we had. I went to set it and broke it. So I had to buy a new timer. Wolf said to get a heavy duty outdoor one but when I looked for one at WalMart, all of them were dusk to dawn only, not setable. Since the timer is inside the coop, I didn't think that would work too well. So I ended up with the same one as I originally had. It allows me to set in 15min increments. 

So after a new timer it still didn't work. I did a little troubleshooting and discovered the power supply itself wasn't putting out power. I found the power cord was chewed almost in half - thank you goats! (pic posted on our facebook page) Even cutting before the damaged part, I still couldn't get any power reading from the power source though. So it took awhile to find my box of spare cords but eventually we located it and was able to replace the cord. Finally I thought I had it fixed for good. It worked great in the house so I reinstalled it in the coop just in time for me to leave town for a few days. Wolf checked it in the morning the first day I was gone and said it had opened. Yeah! But that night it failed to close. Boo! When he checked on it he found a tangle of wires hanging everywhere. He had to close it and go back to letting the chickens out each morning and putting them away each night. Luckily I was only gone for 3 days this trip. When I returned I took the door down and brought it back into the house. He wasn't kidding when he said it was a jumbled mess! One wire was completely off the door laying on the ground. And two wires must've crossed somehow because the batteries had overcharged and split their wrappers. It looked like wolverine had gotten to them!

Since the batteries had overcharged I was afraid something had happened to the control board. Since I needed both new batteries and a new control board I just bought a whole new screwdriver. Found the same style at WalMart for $9. The one pictured is actually the first one but the second was almost identical except for the color and accessories. Sorry, I didn't take pics of the new screwdriver since I knew I had these.

Original screwdriver

This time Wolf suggested I not cut the handle off and instead try to fit everything back inside once I made my modifications. So that's what I did. Here is the first screwdriver with it's handle cut off. Here you see the rocker switch that was on the screwdriver originally, the power control board, the and battery pack. A difference with this one was that it had a little light bulb in front you could turn on to light what you were doing. The new screwdriver had the exact same rocker switch and battery pack, but the board was slightly different. Overall though, close enough to be called the same.

Original screwdriver guts

I had to remove the wires from the old batteries and board and move them over to the new board. I tried to draw a diagram of where everything came from so I could put it back together. Unfortunately in all the movement wires get ripped off the relay so I decide to take them all off and redo them. I get it all staged where I think wires should go, hold them in place with clips, and test. Nothing. Great. Try something else, wires start heating up. Not good. I go back to the pics I took originally but they don't show enough. I resort to finding the original page I used as my guide and copied down the relay schematic. I try that. Bingo! 

As I was putting a wire on the switch (not the rocker switch but my manual on/off switch) it got the metal connector too hot which melted the plastic on the switch and caused the metal piece to fall out. So that switch was out. I thought that's ok, I'll just wire it directly and not have a manual switch. I have it all wired and somehow a wire on the board touches another wire on the board and starts heating up the wire to the batteries. It starts melting. I'm trying to grab the wire and it's burning me and sparking as I rip it off the board. I'm panicking, thinking I'm destroying my new batteries and board. Luckily the only damage was the melted wire covering on the battery line. I let everything cool and tape up the bare wire. I go to put things back together (after 8pm at night now) and I don't know where the battery lines go on the board, or where the wire from the plug goes. Great! I stare at it for a long time, take voltage readings, etc. No a-ha moments come to me. I leave it for a day to give myself time to think about it.  

I realize I need a switch because wiring it directly like I thought would work, obviously didn't (or maybe it wasn't that but I wasn't taking a chance). Next trip to WalMart I pick up a switch from the automotive section ($2). Now I'm ready to get down to business!

Today I look at the board again ready to just experiment and since it's still light out I can see the board actually has a + and - on it telling me exactly where to put stuff. Yeah! 

I clip the wires onto the board and the new switch and test. Everything works great. My batteries are almost dead but I got enough out of them to know it worked. I go to work soldering everything in place. Test one last time and it appears to still be working but the batteries only have one little turn left in them. No problem, at least I know it's working. I go to work putting everything carefully back into the screwdriver body. Since I took the original rocker switch out it left a nice big hole for all my wires to come out of. I secure it to the wood frame and test. Nothing. It's ok. I'm telling myself it's because the batteries aren't charged enough. I'm going to let them charge overnight and fingers crossed everything works in the morning. Boy what a pain it will be if something came loose inside!

This time I also cut my wires to a good size so I don't have a lot of extra hanging around and instead of taping them down I stapled them to the wood with our handy staple gun. It looks much neater but hopefully it will be enough to keep the chickens/goats from ripping them off. Wolf suggests I paint it with resin to cover the wires but I'm hesitant to do that in case I ever need to replace anything. 

Here it is finished.

Finished door

Here are the parts of the door.

lower limit switch with door (white part) closed

upper limit switch with door closed

The relay wouldn't fit inside the screwdriver of course so it stayed in the chicken proof container. Which is just a tupperware container with the lid screwed into the wood, and a hole cut in the lid and side of the container so it can close over the wires. I hot glued the relay down to the lid so it wouldn't move around and possibly loosen a wire.

Relay

 Here is my modified drill bit. The inspiration post used a spool but I found the door went up and down too quick and increased the chances of it bouncing at the bottom and not triggering the limit switch which causes the screwdriver to keep spinning which causes the door to switch direction and go back up until it binds up at the top and starts burning out the motor. I wanted a nice controlled ascent and descent so I went with a long screwdriver bit and a hose clamp to clamp the string onto the bit. This has come in handy more than once when I'm messing with the door and it gets bound up. I can just unscrew the clamp a turn or two and pull the string out. I have the wood on the end because I found the string would wind itself up the screwdriver then fall back down loose and it caused the string to get all tangled up. 

modified drill bit 

Once everything was all done I made myself a nice diagram of the electrics in case I ever need to repair it again, or possibly make another one for our breeder/meat bird pen in the future.

wiring diagram

Mosquitoes!

Oh how I hate these little buggers. Living in CO I forgot how annoying they are. Normally we have very few of these pests. I don't know what the difference is this year but they are all over the place. Working outside is a buzzing pain. There are swarms of them. Years ago my parents brought me this natural bug spray back from Hawaii.

Hawaii Mosquito Spray

It works pretty well. Only negative is that it wears off pretty quickly and I don't want to go through the whole bottle in a couple days. So I decided to make my own so I won't worry about running out.

First step was to look at the ingredients and do a little research online.

Ingredients

I can't do the Noni (amazing stuff, look into it), but the rest seemed doable. After my research and talking with a friend that makes her own I decided on the following ingredients:

Water

Witch hazel

Lemongrass
Eucalyptus

Lavender

These are pretty typical. What I did differently was add peppermint to also deter yellow jackets which are also in high numbers this year.

I put a 50/50 mix of water and witch hazel in each bottle then added varying amounts of each oil. More lemongrass and lavender, less eucalyptus and peppermint. That can be adjusted to individual preferences.

Here is the final product. I made 3 bottle so each person can have one on them when working outside or camping. Just shake and spray. 

Rocky thinks he might need some too

Another hawk attack!

I'm getting really fed up with these hawks. 

We've had a hawk do a couple fly overs the last week. Yesterday we came home and he was sitting on the fence that separates our backyard and the chicken's free range area. The dogs were out and he didn't care one bit. The flock was free ranging but he had his back to him and all chickens were accounted for. DH shot a pellet gun near him to scare him off. Today Wolf was standing at the sink, looked up, and saw the hawk sitting on top of their enclosed area. DH couldn't shoot that direction due to things in the background so I went out there to scare him off. I got pretty close before he finally flew away! The chickens were free ranging but I couldn't see any of them as I walked over. I could hear a little one squawking though so I went out to do a head count just to make sure. A bunch were under the tack room so I couldn't see everyone. I checked on the month olds because I figure they'd be the best target. Luckily all but one was safely in the enclosed area. The one that was squawking was only doing so because she couldn't find her friends. I was about to walk away and noticed the gate to the extra area we have was open so I thought I'd better check in there too. In the corner I could see a ton of feathers and what looked like parts of a chicken. All I could see was maybe a wing pressed up against the fence. My heart dropped and I didn't really want to go over to it. As I got closer I saw more feathers and blood on the rocks. When I got close I found our little Blue Laced Red Wyandotte (BLRW) tucked between a couple large rocks and the gate. Once I got over to her I could see she was at least all there, which isn't what it looked like to start. She had a bloody back but was alive and alert. I took her inside and we cleaned her up, put some antibiotic on it and wrapped her up. She is now in the hospital cage in our bathroom. The wrap has since slipped off so now she just has gauze on it. It is much less severe than our other hawk attacks. We're hopeful she'll pull through pretty quick.  She is missing the skin off her back right above the tail, and has one puncture on the thigh.

Prepping the pasture for horses

Wolf and I have spent nearly every spare minute the last few weeks prepping our back pasture for horses. 

We removed about 150ft of old fence to the left of this picture. You can see the large roll of fencing in the field from that. Then we moved the fence line over about 25 ft, to get rid of a jog in the line and make even pastures. This new fence line is all brand new wire. The first post on the far left of the picture is the corner of the chicken run. We added the gate and fence all the way down to that far fence line. I learned about H-brace for fences and how to build them (seen to the right of the gate). At the 3rd new pole we ran fence to the left over to the goat area. This created a smaller area that is completely fenced. I have let the goats in there to browse and they were excited to get some tall stuff. Future plans for this area are to extend the chicken run or make a manure compost pile here, or both!

All new fence

The rear of our property line had a fence in terrible shape. It was less than 3ft tall in some places, was barely wired on to the posts, just a mess. In this pic you can see the top wire (which I already pulled back up where it should be, it was originally down with the fence) and way down by the ground you can see the fence. 

Old fence at back of property

By working together and pulling the fence back up, straightening it, and tightening its wire ties we were able to make it look like this. We will add a hot wire to keep the horses from pushing this back down if it becomes a problem.

Repaired fence

This is the middle "stall" of our loafing shed/barn thing. The top of the half door on the left can be fully shut if the weather justifies it. On the right is a gate to keep the goats out of it. The area in front is the goats area. That hole you see in the back is us starting to remove the siding to figure out where to put the door. The horse pasture is behind this building so we needed to give the horses access to shelter without the goats getting access to the pasture. Since the stall to the right of this doesn't have a gate or wall in front, the goats can have that one, and the horses will have this one.

 We took down the plywood to see what we were working with

Then sawzall'd the siding and boards out where we wanted the door.

Now there is a perfect horse opening.

New opening from inside

New opening from back. We will eventually add trim around the whole door.

And of course here is our new horse, Luna, enjoying the back pasture. 

Well worth all the work. :) 

Next large outdoor project will be getting the middle pasture goat proof to increase the area they get to roam, and get the front pasture cow ready by spring. 

Dresser to TV stand

Our old TV stand is wide and black and pretty modern looking. It didn't fit style or size in our new place. So of course I start watching craigslist for something I like. I come across this listed as a tv stand...

Before

I was looking at overall feel and did not even think notice this had drawers until I got it home. Don't ask me what I was thinking! So of course I got online and did a quick search of dresser tv stands and saw quite a few examples and knew I could make this work. 

I took the top drawer out, removed the rail, and used a hole saw to cut a hole in the back for wires. 

I was lucky that the thing the drawer was sitting on was a sturdy piece of wood so I didn't have to add anything there. Some projects I saw online had to cut plywood to fit there. 

I painted the it with white chalk paint, then did a clear and dark wax the same as I did for the coffee table (a glaze). I really like applying the dark wax as a glaze and just painting it on. It gives an overall old feeling and depth to the piece. It really makes the details stand out.

After

Now to put the TV and stuff back on it. I personally rarely watch tv so I don't even notice it's not put together but Wolf likes to relax in front of a show at night and he's been relegated to his laptop recently. 

Living room / fireplace makeover

Living room before

This was our living room when we purchased the house. It looks fine on first glace but after you start looking you notice the blood red paint, the black and glass shelves, the black curtains, and as Wolf puts it, the mausoleum fireplace with a homemade mantel that wasn't finished on the ends. All of this had to go.

Don't be fooled into thinking Wolf does everything just because he's the one in the pictures. I'm just the photographer so I'm not in them. And when Wolf does take a pic, I usually don't want me in it. lol!

First came the curtains and shelves. Easy enough. 

Then we primed the red wall and painted it a light green. 

Next we tackled the fireplace. Here's where it got dirty.

The mantel came off easy enough, a couple screws and it was off. The tile was another matter. 

It did not want to come off easily and on the right side of the fireplace it actually took the dry wall with it in a lot of areas. We ended up having to cut out a large section around the fireplace and replace the drywall.

Drywall damage

Putting in new drywall

Luckily we had waited to paint this wall until all this was done. Otherwise it would've needed a second coat. ;)

New dry wall done and wall painted

For some reason I hate brass like what's around this fireplace (and all over the house). So we got some high heat spray paint and covered the brass. It also gave us the opportunity to clean the glass, and it needed it!

No more brass. Yea!

Next to the tile were these little pieces of baseboard that were separate than the rest. They weren't lined up well and looked like crap. We decided to take those out and that's how wide we would do the new fireplace. In the following picture you can see the lovely color they had the rest of the room painted prior to putting it on the market! Can you imagine!? 

We looked and looked at stone like products to use and found that things looked great in pictures or far away but once in person and/or close it was not well done. We found a real stone product at Lowe's called Ledgestone that came in a light mix of tans and whites or greys and rust colors. At first we were leaning toward the light mix but we brought 2 pieces of each home and once up against the wall and floor it was clear that the lighter one would just fade into the wall. 

Our color choices for stone (yes, that little  black rectangle on the left is the color the walls were previously!)

The above pic shows the color choices on the wall before painting. We still weren't sure at that point, though we were leaning toward the darker one. But once we painted the walls it was a no-brainer.

Next we took the tip from an installation video and laid out all the stone to make sure there were no patches of color and to make sure we had enough (we didn't). We also went through each box at the store before buying it and made sure there were no pieces that were all one color (there were some that were solid grey, solid red, or even a weird tan) or broken pieces. Out of 10 boxes (60pcs) Little Owl and I first went through we only pulled out 3-4 pieces. When Wolf and I went back to buy more before installation began we had to go through 5-6 boxes to get enough we liked to make 3 boxes. They had put a new pallet out and I wasn't nearly as happy with the selection. Glad I bought when I did!

All laid out

Once we had all the stone laid out and the painting done we put some painters tape on the wall where we wanted to stop the tile to protect the wall/fireplace from the mortar. Everything was now ready for the stone.

Beginning to put up the stone

When Wolf and I were at Lowe's sorting through the boxes for our second batch a couple stopped and asked us if we were doing a fireplace. They said they had just finished theirs and loved it. They gave us a great tip of screwing a board across the top of the fireplace to support that first row there. They didn't do this but wished they had because their stones slid a little. We were very lucky they stopped and told us this because we definitely wouldn't have thought about it until it was too late. 

Here you can see the board still screwed into the wall under the mantel. We made the mistake of putting one row too many on the left side which didn't leave room for the full board so we had to cut the board on that side. In the picture after talking about the mantel below, you can see the support board.

For the mantel we wanted something natural looking. A large chunk of wood basically. We found two options at Home Depot. A 6x6 or 4x6 rough cut cedar. While we both liked the 6x6 we didn't feel it would fit our low ceilings. To us that was for vaulted ceilings or large rooms. So we opted for the 4x6. Wolf originally wanted to leave the wood rough but I had a smoother piece in my mind. I also didn't want to worry about splinters. Since we had 3 extra ft after cutting it down to our size I used that as my tester piece. After even just a quick sanding it looked and felt a lot better. 

Before (top) and After (bottom) sanding.

So I got out my sander and sanded down the whole thing until I could run my hand across it and not get poked or splinters.

Sanding complete

While at the hardware store we looked at stains for our mantel. We didn't want anything dark since the stone is pretty dark and the rest of the wood in the house is golden oak. We picked a Golden Oak and another color a shade darker to try out. On my sanded test piece I put some of each on there. We hated them both. They looked like crap. Wolf said to just leave it natural but I felt it needed something. I thought maybe just oiling it. I checked our cupboards and found a bottle of Murphy's Oil for wood. I tried that on my sample piece and we loved it so I did the mantel with that. 

Front oiled

Sorry I didn't take any pictures of our mounting system. Basically Wolf took a 1x4 and cut it in half lengthwise with a 45deg cut. He put one half on the wall and the other half on the mantel. Then the mantel just hooked onto the one on the wall. It sounds simple but we actually had a hard time getting this to work because our wall is curved. We ended up having to cut a section out of the piece on the wood so it wouldn't hit the curve.

Making progress. Mantel up, support board still in place

 It took us one day of work on the actual fireplace (not counting laying out the stone, buying it, etc), a wet saw rental, 13 boxes of stone, 50lbs of mortar, sander and sandpaper, Murphy's oil, saw, trowel, dry wall, and paint. It was well worth the effort though!

Finished product

New living room

Chalk paint part 2

I went out and picked up my chalk paint today. I decided on dark grey (can't remember the exact name). The lady at the store was more than happy to give me a tutorial even though I told her I had watched numerous videos. It was still nice to get some tips and reminders from someone that has done a ton of it. I bought a large can of white, a small can of the grey, clear wax, dark wax, and a brush. It was PRICEY! Hope I get a lot of use out of it. 

Before

I heard that the first coat looks like crap and they weren't kidding

First coat on top

First coat all over

But after the second coat it looks so nice!

After the wax I distressed just a little around the edges

A little distressing

Distressing on the corner

And the finished product! I'm really happy with how it turned out!

The finished product

My thoughts: 

1) the brush they sell you kills your hand! I normally can paint for quite awhile but I hadn't even finished the right side of the front and my hand was cramping. Not only that... it STINKS! It is obviously made of horse tail hair but it smells like it wasn't washed at all. It smelled like a dirty horse even after washing with soap 3 times!

2) the paint doesn't seem to go as far as I expected. 

3) I used a cotton rag for putting the wax on (I didn't feel like spending $38-75 on a wax brush!) and it worked just fine

4) A light hand when distressing goes a long way

Overall I love that the piece doesn't take any prep other than a cleaning, the paint doesn't smell (but the wax does), and it dries QUICK. 

Wolf isn't sold on me doing the rest of the furniture yet. I'll have to work on him a little more.