Our busy Sunday this past weekend also included putting a new, summer cover on our chicken hoop house. Mr. Fix-It decided to try adding a little brown spray paint to the plastic cover to offer a little bit of sun filtering and shade. We also hang a tarp on the side to create real shade, but I didn’t object to the extra step because it’s a great opportunity to let the kids practice spray painting something they couldn’t mess up.

Who knew spray painting was a life skill? Like everything else, there’s good techniques and bad techniques for it. Apparently, I only know bad techniques so Mr. Fix-It led this lesson! {smile} And we didn’t have enough cans of dark brown spray paint to go around, so we used a couple different shades.

Gave it a nice, gentle camo feel.

I don’t think it made the slightest bit of different, shade-wise. The tarp inside the hoop house really meets the need there.

And the chickens don’t seem to care one way or another.

But the kids really enjoyed getting to do it. We gave it a few minutes to dry, then put the cover on like usual.

I was a little nervous that it would look obnoxious. It doesn’t. You can barely even see the light brown that was used except for certain times of day when the sun hits it just right. Although the kids think they can point to the exact spot they were working on! Mr. Fix-It had a good point though–the whole thing is a big, obnoxious pile of rusty tin and plastic. A little spray paint is hardly going to make a difference.

The chickens don’t mind that either.

We are thinking about painting the whole thing when we paint the roof of the mobile shade shelter though. Just to give it a little bit longer lifespan.

We got the tin off an old shed building that someone was taking down and offered to us. Some of the pieces are awkwardly cut, and there are a plethora of different holes in the pieces from the times it’s been reused and reattached and reassembled. But it has served us well. As I talked about in our Buildings and Shelters post, sometimes you walk a fine line between salvage/reuse and cost efficiencies and your place looking like a total junkyard. It’s a hard balance.

Meanwhile, everyone is doing just fine. We’re still getting a flood of eggs to turn into yummy freezer meals and the chickens are enjoying a lot of fresh garden scraps as the broccoli and cabbages come along in the garden. How are things around your homeplace?