Improvements

The child gate works like a dream. First thing in the morning when I would go into the run Honey and Amber would always be putting their heads in the hinge corner of the gate or trying to squeeze past me to have a quick forage on the outside of the gate. When this happened I would hold the gate open and wait for them to come back in and have the corn tub on stand by if extra persuading was needed.

It always worried me that if something spooked them and they flew off they wouldn’t be able to find their way back. I always ended up coming through the gate stooped down with my hands cupped against them to try to keep them in. The odd thing was that they only ever did this first thing in the morning.

This morning it was so good to have the barrier of the child gate in place. They couldn’t put their heads in the hinged corner of the gate and they couldn’t slip past me to the outside. As awful as the accident with Honey was, the good that has come from it, is that it made us put up the child gate. It just wasn’t something we had ever thought of before but not only does it safe guard the girls from this kind of accident but it also allows me to slip through the gate easily without trying to hold them away.

The other improvement is Honey’s eye. It is only the second day since the accident and her eye is now half way open.

Honey’s eye still looks poorly but is half open now

This much improvement to her eye in such a short time is really encouraging.

The other improvement we want to make is to cover the last section of the run. We intended to make the decision once we could tell how the run was holding up in the rain. It has been raining all morning and the uncovered section is now a quagmire with muddy puddles collecting.

Before the really heavy rain it was already very wet at the border where the panels end because all the water that runs down the panels gets dumped on to the next section of the run but after more rain the entire outside area was water logged.

The uncovered half of the run is a quagmire

It’s a mass of muddy puddles

We have an extremely busy week of work this week so won’t be able to tackle this next job until the weekend.

We plan to put the movable panels on the middle two strips where they can be overlapped. We will put permanent corrugated panels on the outer edges where the timbers stop them being able to overlap. This should stop water pouring in at the joins. We also intend putting strips of masking tape over the joins in the roof timbers where water is leaking in at the moment.

We will put left over off cuts from the panels round the outside top edge of the run to help water drain out instead of dripping in.

No matter how much work we put in on this run it’s seems that it is never finished. We are hopeful that this may just be the last improvements needed, for a while anyway.