Sue is always up for a challenge, whatever needs to be done to make something work better, she’ll tackle it – even if its something she has never, ever tried before. Thankfully, we have amazing friends and neighbors who are often willing to lend a hand when the job needs another tackler (or two).

Sometimes, in the mornings, I feel like Pinky, from Pinky and the Brain, did you ever watch that old cartoon? It always opens up with Pinky (a white lab mouse) asking “What we going to do tonight, Brain?” Brain’s answer is always, “Same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world!” You should google it, it’s funny. Anyway, sometimes that’s how it seems. Sue has a big plan for the day, so we work on it, but we often have to do it over a number of days and sometimes it doesn’t always go to plan. Today, I wasn’t even home in the morning, but when I got home she was excited…. “Lance may be coming over to help me put the gutter up on the coop porch roof.” Wow, OK. Usually that kind of stuff happens in the morning.

Sue had all the pieces she needed, but wanted someone with knowledge of this type of thing to do the brainstorming with her.  Because Lance and Elise are so amazing, Lance was game to come over and slog around in the chicken coop and figure things out with Sue, after they came home from Tucson. He is such a trooper. Turns out, Lance hadn’t really done much work with gutters either. But he and Sue worked at it till they were set the best configuration and drainage, slope, length, etc.

Sue had to go back to Home Depot a couple of times earlier in the day, to make sure that she had picked up all the needed bits and pieces – and to look at the pictures, she said, that showed you how to put it all together.  Lance is great at looking at things from different perspectives to make sure what they were doing was actually going to accomplish their goal. They tried things out a couple of different ways, but ended up doing mostly what Sue had wanted. They did end up having to build out from the roof with 2×4’s a little so that the gutters would go around existing posts… and Sue had the foresight to purchase a long roll of flashing. They were able to use that to reach from the corrugated roofing into the gutter, so the rain would simply wash between the 2×4’s.

It took a couple of hours for them to figure out everything, but they finished this evening by 6:35. This was an important task to get completed because – well – we’re right int he middle of Monsoon Season now, and the rain water was just pouring off the roof into the coop run. It was a sloggy, sloggy mess. So something needed to be done to direct this water out of the run. You can see, in this photo then accordion end of the gutter. It is going to go into a bucket which will then have a hose that we can position well away from the run and any other sloggy parts.

I really think this was great thing to finish and we are so incredibly thankful that Lance is such an easygoing good sport. We’re going to have to come up with some way to repay him (them both, really) for all the help. Just not sure what that appropriate repayment would be. If you come up with a good idea, let me know. Until then, as always~
Thanks for reading.