Changes and ongoing maintenance

One of the many things we do here is to keep an eye on our house, car and garden maintenance. We don't want things to get out of hand and then not be able to do the repairs ourselves. In the past, Hanno and I could do almost everything we needed to do here but in the past year we've started to slow down a bit and sometimes we need help with some tasks. Kerry cleaned the gutters and the solar panels for us just last month because is not safe for Hanno to be up there now.  We're still as enthusiastic as ever about living our lives here, doing everything we can to keep our slow routines going, but there are changes taking place.

This is where Hanno is building the extension to the chook house.

We often discuss what's coming up for us as we have morning tea on the front verandah; recently the topic of chickens came up. We're getting more chickens from Kate at Beautiful Chickens soon so we decided to enlarge the chicken coop to give the hens more room to shelter from the rain and provide a bigger isolation area for new and sick chooks. Sounds straight forward but there was only one way for us to make the extension and that was to build into the vegetable garden. We'll lose one garden bed. We talked about it for a while and agreed that we'll be doing less gardening in a few years time so the garden reduction will just speed that up a tiny bit. We also agreed that even when we don't do as much gardening as we do now, and when we stop altogether, we'll still keep chooks.

Over the past week, Hanno has been collecting recycled materials from his own work shed and around the district so we can keep our costs right down. We got a quote to have a small cement slab poured and it was over $900! We bought enough 400x400x40 cement pavers (seconds) to cover the same area for $150. The outside wall will still be the outside wall when it's moved back and the dividing wall inside the coop will be wire netting. The girls will see each other but still be separated and they'll eat and drink from different containers. It's quite a big change, and we've had to give up some garden bed, but it will be much better in the future.

Out in the front garden, Hanno has brought in pine mulch and applied that to a few beds. He also attached the old shutters (above) we had in the shop to the lattice work on the front verandah so we can close them off for more protection when it's raining or windy. The shutters had just been sitting around in the shed so it's good to have them in use again.

In the back garden, Hanno moved some of our taps. I always like to have a connected, working hose close to the house in case of fire. The one near the back door was attached to a very old and badly rotted piece of timber. Hanno attached it to a very solid post and rolled the hose up so it can hang neatly out of the way but close enough for us to use in an emergency. He used an old hose hanger we'd been using over on the other side of the yard, attached to one of the tanks. We've both almost tripped over the hose when it was laying on the ground so he bought a hose winder to eliminate the tripping hazard. This thing is really easy to use. It recoils just like a cord on a vacuum cleaner, winds itself up and stays protected from the sun in a plastic case. He had to lower the tap so the hose case can swing around freely but now there's nothing for us to trip over. 

I'm getting on with my maintenance work inside the house too. My latest project is to clean the oven before Christmas, and I'll be doing that today and writing about it tomorrow. I'm hoping to get some others to join me. Are you up for the challenge? All you need is a pack of oxy-bleach - Napisan or the generic form of it. I'm using Di-san, from Aldi.  You'll also need bicarb/baking soda and vinegar. These products are environmentally sound so you won't need the rubber gloves and mask that many of the commercial oven cleaners call for, and if you're asthmatic, like me, you won't be gasping for air.

We enjoy our maintenance work. We see it as part of the daily work we do to enable us to live productive and useful lives in our own home. We hope to be able to do that for many more years to come.  Do you keep on top of your maintenance tasks?

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Dear friends, I've changed the commenting guidelines. There have been a lot of links left in the comments lately, including commercial links. I check everything that comes out of my blog because I don't want to link to commercial sites or non-family friendly sites. I no longer have the time to do that so I'm not allowing any links in the comments from now on. Someone emailed a couple of days ago and asked if she could link to her ebay page in her comment! Every time you leave a comment, it automatically links to your blog or Google page through your name at the top of the comment. Readers will find their way to you via that link. I thank you sincerely for your understanding.

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