Homesteading Aspect Oddball Thread

I built a chicken coop!  The primary building material was pallets.  The structure of the walls and roof is 3' by 6' pallets from a nearby factory.  They're used once and put out back for the permies.  They hold rolls of potato chip bag material and are heat treated.  They're also 80+ pounds and made from oak or maple.  They're exceedingly strong.

I cleared a spot under a white pine.  It's sandy so I just leveled the area and laid down cinder blocks.  I did buy them since used ones are fairly hard to find around here for some reason.  And I didn't want gaps for snakes or weasels to get in through so I liked how they were very rectangular.  I also don't have rocks to build with anyway on my site.  The only other major purchased materials were the metal roofing, housewrap and cattle panels for the hoop house.  The doors were upcycled or from the Habitat Restore.  

It's 9' wide by 12' long.  The roof is two pitches so that the hoop house can fit under the eave on the west side.  The hoop greenhouse gives the birds a warmer place to hang out in winter.  

The walls are higher than 6' on the west side so I made some short pallets to get another 2 feet of height.  The roof pallets are supported with a center beam so that I don't have cross ties to hit my head on.  All the windows and vents were carefully built to make sure critters couldn't get in.  Hardware cloth is on all the windows.  I made the windows from pallet scraps and some left over greenhouse glazing panels.  They aren't my best work but they do the job.

In addition to building the structure from pallets, I used deconstructed pallet boards for the siding inside and out.

Caveats:
1.  50+ pallets for the siding were disassembled by me but installed by the missus so I don't get credit for installing the pallet boards on the walls.
2.  The coop is wired but I'll submit that in the Electricity badge.

I replaced a broken garage door opener today.  First I tried to fix it by resoldering the mother board.  That didn't break it any worse than it was but it didn't fix the intermittent issue.  Then it got worse to the point where it wouldn't open no matter how many times you whacked it.  So I got a new one and changed them out.  Today I learned that you can't just change the motor/unit out, you have to replace the rail and chain too.  Who knew?

It went pretty well.  I took down the old unit, safety sensors and push button and then assembled the new rail, motor and chain.  Put that up and connected it to the door and ran the new wires to the new sensors and push button.  Made a few up/down travel adjustments and it's all done.  Yay, just in time for winter!

It happens to be a lovey warm November day here in Michigan, probably the last one for the year.  The other day I noticed the screen door for my front door was not latching well.  Investigating further I declare it fundamentally a poor design for the door.  Over time the aluminum hinges are literally grinding themselves away under the weight of the door and the swinging motion.  Rather than replacing the whole door I want to see if I can find a solution that will salvage it for a while longer, and perhaps even fix the issue indefinitely.

For an overview of what I did, I pulled the door off the hinges, removed the hinges, found some finish washers I already had lying around that fit to build up the space that had worn down thus raising the door up higher again so the latch should fit.  My hope is that these added washers and the way they fit over the aluminum sections will stop the slow grinding down of the aluminum.  Time will tell on that, but this should give me a few more years use of the door at least.

Overall, figuring out how to disassemble, find the parts, install them, and reassemble the door I probably spent about an hour.  Unfortunately I also broke the jaws on one of my really expensive sets of jewelers non-marring pliers, making this a more pricey fix than it should have been.  Grrr...   I believe I can get replacement jaws for those though so they aren't totally destroyed thankfully.  Ok, here are some documenting images.