PotterWatch's Burrow

[PotterWatch]

I am a homeschooling mom living in suburbia. We have grand plans to move to the country, but of course things have to fall into place first and there is no telling when that will happen. For now, we are trying to live more simply and depend less on the outside world for everyday living. I love to bake and do it often. We currently have six chickens and plan on getting some more chicks for laying and some broilers within the next couple months. We are picking up two mini-mancha does during the first week of November. Looking forward to the milk and potential meat (we are going to try and sell the kids, but they will go to the butcher if we are unable to find buyers). We have created a garden plot during our recent re-landscaping of our property, and will be planting during the spring as I think I am a bit late to get in on the winter growing season this year. I did not grow up with this kind of lifestyle and neither did my husband, so we are learning as we go along. I'm sure all of our family members think we are insane, lol. First homeschooling, then chickens, now goats. I will try and post some more pictures once we get them off our broken computer, but for now, here we are:

The front of our house after re-landscape:

Some of our chickens before landscaping:

Our backyard almost finished. Still have to put up the fencing for the chicken run and build the new coop:

I'll make sure to update when we get the goats. We aren't self-sufficient yet, but are doing our best with what we have!

 

[2dream]

Sounds like a great start to me. I want goats soooooooo bad. DH says "Naaaaaa".
I will win I don't know why he even bothers to object.

Great looking place you have there. Where do you plan for your garden to go?
(I wish my place was as neat and tidy as yours).

 

[keljonma]

You have some great looking chickens there - happy and healthy looking!

 

[MorelCabin]

That is awesome! I must say I have never heard of anyone ever having goats while living in town though:>) Very pretty home!

 

[Woodland Woman]

I am a homeschooling mom living in suburbia with chickens too. ( it encroached upon us) I'll have to see how having goats works out for you. That's on my list too. Nice pictures.

 

[Henrietta23]

Sounds like a great start to me. I want goats soooooooo bad. DH says "Naaaaaa".
I will win I don't know why he even bothers to object.

Great looking place you have there. Where do you plan for your garden to go?
(I wish my place was as neat and tidy as yours).

Ditto! Only mine has a contigency of people also trying to talk me out of it!
Nice place! I agree. : )

 

[PotterWatch]

In the last picture, where my husband is walking across, you can see a stretch of dirt about 10x35 that is between the grass and the planter area next to the fence. Part of that (10x15), is going to be the chicken run, and the rest of it will be my garden. Not huge, but since I haven't done any gardening since I was a child, it should be more than enough for me to take care of. We have valves already installed there with drip hoses to make watering easy.

Our house used to look much worse. Here are some pictures from when we moved in (my sil lived here before us and left all the stuff you can see in the pictures).

The front of the house:

A view of the backyard from the roof. We had already, at this point, had a big half-dead tree removed as well as the back fence and a dilapidated picket fence that divided the yard:

More pictures are posted at http://www.picturetrail.com/our2boys , in the home remodel album. Keep in mind that all the stuff in the pictures is what was left for us to clean up. I don't have our most recent pictures up in that album, but as soon as we get our inspections done, we can move everything in the house to where it should be and I will take more pictures.

It's been a long road to get the house to where it is now. My sil who owned the house before us (it is the house my husband grew up in), had good intentions, but just didn't have the money to keep it up. We are nearing the finish now of what we have the resources to accomplish, but will keep working on it. We have plans to buy trees to put around the current fenceline, but we will have to aquire them slowly as we get the money.

 

[punkin]

Great job. I love the play area for the kids. Let us know when you get the goats. I can tell my DH that even "city people" are getting goats. Why can't we have them?

 

[Seahound]

I just looked at your remodel album !!! WOW you did alot of remodeling. What a beautiful new kitchen you have ..
I love the red walls also !!

 

[PotterWatch]

So later this afternoon we are having a small barbeque with my sil and her kids. I am baking hotdog and hamburger buns right now and will make a cake a little later. This is the first somewhat social event we are having since we started to relandscape. I can't wait to see what sil thinks of the house (she is the one who lived here right before us). Tomorrow, I am really going to try and convince my husband that we need to take the truck over to where some apartments are being built and ask if we can go through their garbage pile. We need to get the enclosure built for the goats this week since we are going to go pick them up the week after. I also want to get started on the new chicken coop and I need some more wood for that. Hope we can pick up lots of great wood from that construction site as we just don't have the money right now to be buying stuff.