This weekend we worked ourselves hard again and managed to paint the entire chicken coop, brick out a hole in the wall leading to the outhouse and dungheap (which the dog loved to use when we first got this house and Ayla smelled just lovely after romping around in the pile of waste) and laid out the wooden tiles just to see how it all looks.

You might recall our post from last weekend and the work we did on the back wall of the area, plastering over all the bricks and rocks which had become exposed. Now that the plaster is dry, it looks like this…

and after seeing all the various colors it turned out to be, it makes me rather happy we decided to paint everything.

You may have seen this contraption in a few of the photos and wondered what it is…so I thought I’d take a close up of it since I’m not sure I ever have before. This was used to behead the chickens. They actually used this until they moved out because it was caked with blood and feathers when we started cleaning things up. Stefan took the pressure washer to it and made a huge difference but obviously we don’t have plans to use it for anything anytime soon…until we have children perhaps and Stefan may use it as an intimidation method for your suitors lol.

As I mentioned, we had a chicken-sized hole in the wall which needed to be bricked out before we could really open this space up because we’re not too excited about the dog smelling like a yetti all the time. It’s bad enough that she gets rained on but at least that generally doesn’t make her smell terrible. And speaking of rain, it poured on Saturday afternoon which left Ayla giving us her best sad puppy look at the kitchen door 😉

Since we had some bricks left over from other construction projects, Stefan used those and some concrete to fill up the hole as much as possible

He put a bit of mortar between each brick to keep them all together but he ended up having to skip it on the top brick because there wasn’t enough room left to get it in there. He put a tiny bit but it really wasn’t enough to hold the brick in place. Here’s was the view from the outhouse side.

Naturally it wasn’t all easy though. The top brick gave him some trouble but in the end the bricks lost and Stefan got the hole closed off. Now we just have to wait for it to dry so we can paint it too.

While Stefan was working on the hole, I started painting the walls inside the coop white. When I first started, we were a bit apprehensive. I had gotten one of the side walls done when Stefan looked at me and said he wasn’t really sure he liked it…but there was no turning back then. So I continued on and this was at about the half way point since we also painted the ceiling.

We were nearly done here. Stefan had finished his work on the wall and lent me a hand with some of the painting. Both of us decided that we hate painting ceilings and we’ll just use our sprayer when we paint the mudroom…but it probably would have been even more work for us to use it in this space and we would have had spray dust everywhere – not to mention it probably would have taken longer to clean the machine afterwards than it did for us to actually paint everything.

And here’s our nearly finished product. We finished painting the brown beams also and painted the one running along the back of the room as well. Now that it’s mostly done, we are really happy with the outcome because it changes the feel of the room entirely. Now it feels like a living space instead of just some former animal area and the white vs. former gray concrete color is a vast improvement. Everything is much brighter in there which it needed since there isn’t really much like that ends up flowing in here. We also started laying down the wooden tiles on the floor but since we were doing that part on Sunday, we couldn’t cut the tiles to fit. We are now thinking that it may be better if we build the benches first and then put down the flooring afterwards around everything…but we’re just not sure. I am pretty certain that we won’t do anything to the floor before the party though. Instead we’ll just be focusing on a few little things and making sure we have everything together for the main event.