Gutters

We have learned a few important lessons these past few weeks. One is that Christmas time is really busy for everyone, so very little gets done on the farm.

The other is that the project of installing gutters on the chicken houses is long overdue.

We recently picked up a trio of sapphire gem hens from a member of our local Catholic community. The hens were a little too rambunctious for their small yard, and their small children, so we re-housed them.

As usual when introducing new hens to the flock we housed them in the empty yard for a week or so before mingling the flocks.

This way they can all check each other out and get used to the newcomers being there. We find it cuts down on fights when they are actually mingled.

This led to us spending more time in the west hen house than we have for the last few weeks since we moved the ducks out of it. In the course of this, we made two important discoveries.

1. Apparently one of the chickens is part duck.
2. The puddle on the corner of the house has been undermining the pad on that corner.

This is, of course, not desirable. We figure the water running off the eaves forms puddles, which have been slowly eroding the sand and gravel the pad is built on, then as they recede they wash some of that sand and gravel with them. The other chicken coop has not suffered the same way because it has been banked up with wood chips for the last two years. However, those have broken down pretty thoroughly (and need to be harvested for use in the garden) so now the edge of the pad is beginning to show, and will soon develop the same problem if not corrected.

So we made a trip to the hardware store.

First step, extending the rafters so they had vertical ends. When we built the chicken houses we didn’t know what we were doing, so all the rafters ends were cut to 90 degrees. Of course this means that the ends were all oriented at an angle, not straight up and down, which is what you want in order to hang gutters. So we cut 52 extenders that would screw to the ends of the rafters and add 30 degrees to the ends so they could be vertical.

Took a wheelbarrow to move them all. Fortunately, Seppi was up for the job.

Once they were on site, we got right to work. Seppi found something to hit with a hammer…

And when that was adequately hit, he found a stick and started beating down the weeds in the chicken yard.

Once the extenders were in place, I screwed on the face boards, and sealed them with deck sealant. The face boards serve two purposes, as I understand it. They provide something for the gutter spikes to nail into (other than the end grain of the rafters) and they provide a rigid surface to support the back side of the gutters, which are pretty flimsy.

And that was as far as we got, because Christmas happened.

After Christmas, we learned a couple of other important lessons. For one thing we learned that hanging gutters is a two-man job. It is virtually impossible for one person to hold up a ten-foot length of gutter on both ends while nailing it in and keeping it just ever so slightly slanted. Adam was busy most of the morning, and I got nothing accomplished on the gutters other than a big steaming pile of frustration until Adam got back. Then we got the gutters on one building completely hung in a little over an hour.

We also learned that this a job best done in some other month than December. The glue refused to run in the 40 degree weather, then it opted to take forever to set. Not to mention the wind blowing the unattached gutter segments, and frequently getting interrupted by rain squalls.

But we got both sides up eventually. For now the downspouts are running to the back of the coop so that they will fill a watering trough, which will overflow away from the building (thanks to Seppi, who is a dwarf, who is digging a hole [diggy-diggy hole]).

Eventually we will install vertical water tanks on the back side of the house, mounted on cinder blocks, which will gravity-feed a watering trough so the hens will get water automatically. This is the way to go, as we have found with the cows and sheep. Not having to run water cuts 5-10 minutes off chore time every day.