New England's Narrow Road

Make the Winter Birds Happy With Homemade Suet

01/21/2012

tags: birds, feeding, homemade suet, making suet, recipe, suet

My Homemade Suet

Just about this freezing time of year, I usually begin to make up batches of homemade suet to feed my backyard birds. I bought some beef suet at the local grocery store and stuck it in the freezer for winter feeding and now that it’s January and finally getting quite cold, it’s time to give the birds a treat.

My recipe includes adding peanut butter and stale crackers, cornmeal and just about any other thing the birds might like to the store bought beef fat. I usually add some old bread (kept in the freezer too) and flour to hold it all together and then cool it in a large, foil pan.

Personally, I don’t like to add seeds. I keep the seeds in separate feeders.

Once it’s firm, it can be cut to size to fit your suet feeder or placed in a mesh bag. I only put one piece out at a time and freeze the rest, just in case some animal comes and takes it in the night. I had a fox eyeing the feeder one year.

Just a word of warning – your birds will love this and eat it up quickly! The squirrels will like it too, of course.

Homemade bird food for our outdoor friends (newenglandpetguide.wordpress.com)
Marcia Davis: Lingering warblers visit suet feeders, birdbaths (knoxnews.com)
Feeding Wildlife: Squirrels Getting Fat on Bird Seed (newenglandsnarrowroad.wordpress.com)

Bathroom Makeover – Refinishing The Tub

01/11/2012

tags: bathroom, bathtub, cost, makeover, peeling, refinishing, shower, tub

Hideous!

When I bought my house, I knew there would be much to do to make it livable. While I was busy shelling out money for garage doors without holes in them, siding that wasn’t rotting off the walls and fixing the leaky basement, my tub was slowly peeling.

Someone (before I bought the place) had given the downstairs bathroom a quick makeover by slapping some white paint all over the tub and shower area – it’s even on the tiles. As we began to use that shower, the paint began to peel. It was impossible to clean the tub without pulling the layer of paint off, and the whole thing had become almost unusable and tremendously disgusting looking.

The house was built in the 1970′s and as I found out (and you can see here) the tub/shower had once been gold. In fact the guy who came out to give me an estimate for the refinishing said it looked like it had been refinished twice already.

So what’s your option when your bathroom looks like this? You can re-do the entire thing and rip out the old – but bathtubs won’t fit through doorways, so how do you get a new one in when they are usually installed when the house is built? Well, not without a lot of mess and huge amounts of money.

The only other option is to refinish the existing one. A company called “Miracle Method” did mine. It was suppose to take one day and ended up taking two full days. (Apparently my tub was one of the extremely gross ones.) Then one day (24 hours) for the job to cure. Fortunately I have another bathroom upstairs to use.

I had to pull off the wood strip along the base of the tub, take down the shower curtain rod (which was screwed into the tile) and have a plumber come out and remove the faucet, handle, etc. (He had to return to put new ones back on too.)

It was a messy job. Sanding down the tub caused white dust to fly everywhere and even though I took everything I could out of the room, I had to wipe down the walls and floor afterwards – after the horrible smell went away which took about 3 days.

It cost me a little over $1,000 for this, but I am happy with the results, even if the tub is not like a normal tub. It’s more like a paint job on a car. In fact the guy who did the job said it would hold up best if I applied Canuba wax to it occasionally! I also have to be careful when cleaning it. So, it’s not like a new tub, but like a “better than what was there” tub.