Third Time Is A Charm. We hope!

Hi All!
Well... We're going to give the Turkeys one more try. The poultry netting we are using to keep the birds confined had openings that were a bit too big. Turkeys are more long and narrow where chickens are more short and fat. Several times when we were around their pen the turkeys would get out and come visit us. We figured after living in the house for six weeks they were imprinted on us and only got out because they saw us. Evidently not so. After a couple of days they were nowhere to be found.

Not ones to give up easily we bought two more. They're just now three weeks old so we're back to having birds in the house again. Learning from our previous mistakes we have a plan to keep them   in the pen once they move outside.

Yesterday Susan was working by the garden and just about stepped on this critter...

We talked to a friend that said momma will come back at dusk and dawn to feed it and in a couple of days they'll move on. Checked on it this morning and it's still doing fine.

My brother and sister-in-law gave us this sign.
We finally got it up along our driveway.

That's all for now.

Take care.
Brian

Finally!

Hi All!
It may seem that we haven't been doing much on the house for the last couple of months. Truth is we've been working on the same thing for what seems like an eternity. We had this grand plan for the master bathroom floor that has been difficult to make happen, to say the least. The vision was to have a stream (complete with fish) running through the bathroom and into the shower. The rest of the floor is flagstone, as you've seen in previous posts. That was easy.

First I'll show the pictures of the finished product and then I'll explain what went into it.

After watching countless videos on YouTube and asking everyone we could think to ask via email and in person we were told it just wasn't going to work. But we just couldn't let it go. Two main problems, the clear epoxy that looks like water in the stream was going to a) try to run down the drain when we poured it and would be b) very slippery when wet.

After multiple attempts with multiple tactics we solved the problem with the epoxy running down the drain by putting a collar around the drain and pouring the epoxy right up to it level with the flagstone. In order for the shower to drain properly the floor has to slope. Hence the problem with the epoxy running down the drain.  A sawzall (recipricating saw) and belt sander removed all the excess epoxy and created a slope down to the drain.  Fortunately a thin coat of fresh epoxy fills in all the sanding marks and makes the epoxy clear again.

Slippery? Oh baby was it slippery. One shower told us it was a major medical expense waiting to happen. Early on in the project our stone mason had suggested some grit that is made for mixing in floor sealers to make floors less slippery. We had tried it a couple of different ways in some tests we did. It always made the epoxy cloudy to the point we lost the effect of water in a stream.  We had to come up with something so we tried again. One teaspoon of grit in 100 ml of epoxy ended up being just right when applied with a paint brush. The epoxy was still clear enough to appear as water and there was enough texture so as not to feel as though you were taking a shower on an ice skating rink. Actually it feels very safe.

Now we can get back to other house projects that will hopefully move much faster than the bathroom floor did.

An update on livestock. Chickens are doing fine. We get between 3 and 5 eggs a day. Of our two turkeys, only one made it. We really wanted more than one, so we bought two more at about the same age as the lone survivor. We set about making a shelter / roost for the turkeys and put them in a fenced enclosure right next to the chickens.

The Turkey's new home

Set up in the pasture next to the chickens

We moved the turkeys out to their new home on Sunday. Monday morning we went to check on them, no turkeys. I cannot believe that some varmint got all three of them the first night. And the netting around them is electrified!  Seems they got lonely and jumped the fence. The were over with the chickens. We let them stay there until today when we combined their yards into one. Who knows who will roost where tonight.

Thats all for now.
Take care.

Brian