A few months ago I was complaining to you about the overwhelming number of tasks required to get our house and garden into ship-shape order.

Well, I’m actually looking forward to the next six months. My inside jobs are tedious but I’ve made a little decision about the painting work: I’m buying a spray gun contraption. Yep, I’ve spat the dummy where our ceilings are concerned and I’m going to spend some of my birthday money on a paint spray gun. Yay!! Of course, this means I’ll be painting ALL the things, including our kitchen/dining room, entryway, the Jesus bathroom, and internal storage rooms.

Before I do this however, I need to finish cleaning the Jesus room. I’m nearly there: I’ve offloaded my old desk to my daughter; I’m most of the way through my tax and I’m about to have a massive clean-out of old, unnecessary paperwork. Then it will get a furniture re-arrange, and possibly some new window guards to block that hideous summer sun that essentially blows the heat in our house up from a reasonable 26 degrees centigrade to a hideous 34.

Tomorrow I have an old mate coming round to quote me on some outdoor projects, including a fox-proof chicken run. The chooks are looking like they were attacked by foxes last night. No deaths yet, thank goodness, because I haven’t cut their wings recently and I don’t shut them up. Hence they were able to escape. But there are feathers everywhere, including in the nesting box, and one of the girls is looking very odd and scruffy, while another has lost some of her tail feathers. They’re a bit jumpy today. The visit by old mate has actually been planned for a while, so I hope my girls don’t cark it before they have a chance to live in safety!

We’re planning build a coop that will be affixed to our huge concrete wall. This means I will have to PAINT said wall prior to the affixing. Hence, Paint Spray Gun. That wall is BIG, y’all!

The chickens are going to get the REAL Taj Mahal of chicken runs. We will build a structure on the back wall to the right which will start at nearly 3m high, and drop to about 2m. The width of the run will be 3 metres, and the length about 4 metres. That’s a proper room size. A small bedroom for humans. A dog house, even. The roof will be classic tin, with hardwood timber posts concreted into a shallow channel that runs all the way round the coop, possibly on a small brick base. I want the chooks to have natural dirt beneath their feet, especially if we’re away for several days and they need to stay locked up. The whole construction will be a simple tin and wood one, with sturdy steel mesh that’s better than the crap stuff currently stapled into their balsa-wood coop. A locking door at the front, and their original coop secreted inside, with enough space inside the run for me to clean it, and I think we’re done here!

I’m rather tempted to paint the run and make it pretty like this one here…! And perhaps I’ll get me a lovely treadle feeder that will be sturdier than the last one I bought, which was, sad to say, a complete failure.

I’ll let you know how I get on.