As a confession, I’m tight with my money. That may be a product of my genetic heritage as I have both highland and lowland Scottish ancestral blood coursing through my veins (this is not based on any real knowledge of the real situation). However, it is probably because many years ago I realised that if a person was to spend less, they wouldn’t have to earn as much and that is OK with me.

It is a simple, but very effective objective. The difficulty with that implementing that objective is that a person has to employ various strategies to achieve it. Here the old timers have many useful, but sadly often neglected, advice on such important matters. The old timer’s strategic advice includes the mantra: Re-use, recycle, and repair.

That old mantra is such good advice that I keep it at the forefront of my mind when constructing a project. And thus, with the recent awesome and now mostly completed – rat proof, well, so far anyway – chicken housing project (codenamed Chooktopia) a fork in the road was reached and the hard question was asked: Do I purchase a brand new water tank to collect rainfall off the roof of the new chook pen?

That particular fork in the road was a tough fork to ponder. In such situations it is good to reach back to the memories of the old timers and ask the question: What would the old timers do in such a situation?

The answer quickly arrived in the form of the mantra: Re-use, repair and recycle.

All answers are obvious from hindsight, aren’t they? Anyway, the first option of the old timer’s mantra is re-use and I thought to myself, well why not?  Re-use it was then!

It just so happened that I had a small water tank (2,100L or 555 gallons) that was available to be moved over to new Chooktopia project from an existing use without a great loss of water storage capacity in that area. That idea also appealed to my general demeanour of tightness and without much further consideration or pondering, that small water storage tank was re-used on the Chooktopia project. However, it left a dogs breakfast (i.e. that is a colloquial term for a real mess) of the area that I repurposed it from.

Re-using that water storage tank occurred in a bit of a hurry, so I was left with no working water taps in the lower garden, a large overflow pipe sitting out of the ground, a flat concrete pad where the water storage tank once sat and two hastily disconnected pumps in covers. What a mess! But at least I didn’t have to purchase a brand new water storage tank!

The flip side of any mess is the opportunity to repair the situation or reconfigure that mess so that it just works better. I took the opportunity to make the mess that little bit better and spent a bit of time pondering the problem, and then just got to work.

For the rest of the entry click on: http://ferngladefarm.blogspot.com.au/