Recently I was approached by a local company, Naturalyards, about doing a product review. After careful consideration, I agreed to it because they met my criteria: 1) they are a great company, 2) they make a quality product 3) it’s a product we need for our homestead and 4) it’s a product you might actually be interested in. In exchange for receiving their product, I
Kitchen Facelift
In our series of room facelifts for our tiny house, we did some simple changes to our kitchen as well. This room functions as a kitchen and dining space and is luckily one of the larger rooms in our house. Before the kitchen had a funky light hanging over the dining area from Ikea, which has since died of unknown causes. We were repurposing a
Bedroom Facelift
Since returning to our Portland homestead, we have turned our winter focus inside to making our tiny house feel as comfortable and space-efficient as possible. We started with our narrow bathroom and Bug’s nursery. Our nesting has spread to our bedroom now as well. Our poor bedroom has a few challenges. Storage is an issue, as we only have one tiny closet. We also needed
Tutorial: DIY Upholstered Headboard
There are some long nights ahead of us with the coming arrival of our baby. Those nights will be spent sitting up in bed, half awake, nursing our little girl. We have never had a proper bedframe, so we decided to kill two birds with one stone by making a headboard that frames the bed and provides some comfort sitting up on those long nights.
New Year, New Bathroom
It’s a new era for us in our Portland house and time for some updates. We plan to be here for a while and want to enjoy the house as much as possible. But like many houses, there are things here and there that drive us nuts. With a baby on the way, we decided that if we don’t make changes now they will never
The New Duck Coop
Construction is complete! The runner ducks have a new, permanent home here on our little homestead. It should be a safe, predator proof place for them to sleep, play and lay eggs. Ducks need a little more wiggle room than chickens. Allow about 4-6 square feet per bird in their duck house and 10-25 square feet per bird for the run. In our case, the
Holiday Prep
The holidays this year are something we are admiring from a distance, rather than actively getting into the spirit of. Boxes are still stacked like a maze in our house from moving and projects are lined up high. What we would do without our sense of humor about it all? The duck coop is getting closer to completion and I suspect the final touches will
Duck Coop Construction
The ducks are getting a new, permanent home – slowly but surely. Last week we did some deconstruction and site prep. This past weekend I drew up some loose plans and we started building. The duck house should give each bird about 4-6 square feet of space while the run area can be anywhere from 10-25 square feet per bird. This wide variation may have
Building the Shared Run
Ducks need more outside room generally than chickens, so we set about building a large run for our new flock. We planned on about five square feet of outside space per duck, which meant we needed a run that was twenty square feet total. Since we are renting this year, nothing can be permanent about the duck house and run. The chickens and ducks each