Bunny Room Upgrade

Well the mantle's been constructed and stained for 3 weeks. It hasn't been warm enough to apply the polyurethane one single day since then, so it's languishing in my living room.

We did manage a little house productivity yesterday in the form of removing the chartreuse carpet from the bunny hallway. I liked the carpet a lot, but it was more than 30 years old, and Winston had taken a shine to scratching at it to file down his claws. I didn't care that he was wrecking the carpet, but was a little worried he'd eat the fibers.

So now it's gone, and to our surprise, the floors underneath are perfect. The best floors in the house. Naturally.

We also moved the chest from the attic downstairs as a place to keep all of Winston's bunny plunder. It's a vast improvement, no?

In other news, life is getting slightly less terrible and snow-covered for the chickens, we've started our first round of seeds for spring planting, and I'm hopeful that today might be the first precipitation-less day in more than a month.

Winston Cruger-Wilson, Esquire

Our bunny is doing quite well, which is a relief. The week after we got him, he had to be sent to the bunny emergency room and pumped full of expensive bunny meds. Turns out, rabbits are fragile, and when they move around, a shift in their routine results in emotional and gastro-intestinal distress, which can be fatal.

But now Winston's feeling right at home. He's eating all the exciting bunny foods he was rejecting, like Timothy Hay and fruit tree twigs (yummm..?..) and fiberous okra pods. He has free range on the second floor of the house, and comes into bed to snuggle and give kisses.

We still don't have a clicker, so he hasn't learned any tricks. He does do a cool celebration dance when he's about to get pellets, his favorite food.

 His best trick is probably refusing to stand still so I can take a good shot with my camera.

That, and stepping on the laptop and pausing whatever show I'm watching when he feels he isn't being given enough snuggles.

December Update: BUNNY!!

It's been a month since I've posted, but many fun things have happened. All three hens are now laying eggs, and most days we get 3! We're making quiche, pancakes, and egg salad often. We also bartered with our neighbor - eggs for fresh herbs from their hydroponic system. Pretty excellent.

It's snowed often in the last two weeks. So much so that our backyard looks like this:

You can barely see the coop! The girls don't seem to mind the cold, but they aren't interested in searching through snow to find scratch. They're also going through A TON of food each day.

Perhaps the most exciting development is that we've added a new member to our family: Winston the Holland Lop bunny! He was hanging out at our local pet store one day when we went to pick up chicken food and we (really, I) fell in love. Apparently he's been adopted twice and then given up twice, once because a family was moving, and once because he was keeping his companion up at night (she lived in a college dorm, I think, so he was in her bedroom.)

We just picked him up today, and he seems wonderful. So gentle, interested, and mega cute. He's getting used to his new home right now, and we hope to give him full run of his "bunny room" soon, and let him wander around the house with us when we're home.

Here is the finished house with litter box, hay rack, water bottle, a few toys, and some hide-y houses. We put the tea kettle box as a step so he could make it to the second level of his condo, but he didn't have such things in his other homes and he doesn't seem to know what to do with it. We'll see if we can make it work, or if we'll need to build a ramp.

Here's a close up shot of him getting a refreshing drink of water. How cute is this guy?

It looked a little more tidy and roomie before we added all his bunny accoutrements.

Very exciting stuff!

We've done nothing on the house it what seems like forever. It's too cold to stain the last bits of trim we need to install. I wanted to paint the kitchen, but when it's 20 degrees, I don't exactly want to keep the windows open and at that temperature, the paint wouldn't dry anyway. Grrrrrr.