restoring the roost

North Carolina Country Living and Farmhouse Style

North Carolina Country Living and Farmhouse Style
since 2010

Processing our Heritage Birds for Meat

· chickens, Homesteading

Our flock has grown so big (19 chickens plus 3 turkeys!) and at some point culling is a necessary part of good flock management. It breaks my heart, but it was time to process our extra roosters and our turkeys for meat. As meat eaters, we would rather know where our food comes from and that it had a good life and was treated humanely, even as sad as it is when butchering day comes.

some of the lucky survivors

We decided to process 5 of our roosters that we decided not to keep for breeding and 3 heritage Bourbon Red turkeys.

After selecting the roosters to be processed based on breeding characteristics, we put them into crates and pens for the night. Early the next morning my husband took them to a local processor and they returned to us a few days later.

We chose to get the birds processed whole with one chicken and one turkey left fresh and the rest frozen.

Dominique chicken, male

We cooked the fresh turkey for Thanksgiving and it turned out great- extremely flavorful and juicy! The rest of the processed birds we have in our deep freeze. One bird can make several meals, and the carcass will then be used to make stock. Nothing is wasted!

turkeys and chickens in our deep freeze

fresh turkey ready to roast

Though it was still hard, we did not let ourselves get attached to these birds (maybe except a little to the turkeys…) as we have to groups hatched in the past. Now our reduced flock is much more manageable and we are one step closer to accomplishing our homesteading goals. We are also trying to progress in good poultry keeping and animal husbandry skills. And I can’t help but think this is something our farming ancestors would have done long ago, a little differently of course, and that we are continuing some of those traditions 🙂

Do you process your heritage or dual-purpose birds for meat?

Window Types for Historic Houses

· architectural history, historic preservation and sustainability, restoration basics

Thank you all for the well wishes and congratulations on the arrival of our twin girls. We are all hanging in there and adjusting to life with these sweet babies. Sleep is certainly a luxury sometimes hard to come by and our days are a never-ending cycle of nursing, changing diapers, laundry and baby chores. Thank goodness I have family to help out!

Now on to the real post: I’m warning you now, I may go on a *bit* of a rant here when it comes to windows in historic houses. As you all probably know, I am VERY partial to retaining original windows not just because it preserves the original fabric and historic integrity of the property, but also for practical, sustainable, functional and economic reasons.

But before I get too much into why old houses need to retain their original windows (perhaps I’ll save it for the next post) , I’d like to start by highlighting some common types of original historic windows and the various ways that a lot of homeowners end up replacing them. Sometimes when an older home is purchased the owner may find the original windows were already replaced, and they may have the task of choosing new ones that best fit the historic character of the home.

Here are some various types you may see on older or historic buildings:

1. Double hung, wooden, 6/6 sash

Beaufort, NC

Chowan County, NC

2. Double hung, wooden, 2/2 sash

Midway, KY
Perquimans County, NC

3. Double hung, wooden 1/1 sash


4. Double hung, wooden 4/4 sash

Add caption

5. Double hung, 9/9 sash

Andrews-Moore House, Franklin County, NC
Window from Concord United Methodist Church, ca. 1928, McDowell County, NC

7. Fixed windows

Ernest Swarts House, Guilford County, NC
Interior of Ernest Swarts House, Guilford County, NC

8. Aluminum awning or “hopper” style windows (typically found on mid-century buildings)

9. Decorative, leaded glass, or stained glass windows (often fixed)

Woodford County, KY

10. Casement windows, wood or metal

Durham County, NC
Durham County, NC

This is just a small sampling of various types of windows found on historic buildings. Many more types exist not shown here that you may be familiar with or have seen before. For example, some houses have “cottage style” double-hung wood sash windows, with a six-over-one sash profile.

What window types do you have in your historic house? Or perhaps you may have a type not shown here that is common to your region?

The Twins are Here!

· family

And we have two baby girls!!!!! We were in utter shock as we surely thought we’d be having a boy/girl set or two boys- so when our little ones came out they gave us quite the surprise!

Introducing…… 

June and Georgia
4 lb 11 oz  and 4 lb 12 oz
Born October 24 at 36 weeks, both head down vaginally at 7:18 and 7:45 

We couldn’t be more in love with these precious babies- praise be to God! 

Filed Under: family

Almost There…..

· family

I’m now over 35 weeks pregnant with twins and less than two weeks away from being full term for twins (about 37 weeks)!!! I’m so happy to be so close. I cannot express how incredibly grateful I am to have made it this far with our preterm labor scare at 29 weeks. Thank you all for your sweet comments, thoughts and prayers.

Before the babies come, I thought I’d share with you some of our maternity photos, taken by the lovely April with April Cole Photography. These were taken when I was 30 weeks and I (as have the babies) have since grown quite a bit bigger- hard to believe I know! Since we were rather limited with my mobility, April was nice enough to come out to our house and shoot the photos right there on our property!

Here are some of my favorites:

And don’t you know that the turkeys had to stick themselves into the photos?! They seriously won’t leave us alone when they are loose (it’s quite annoying) and flew up onto the porch to check out what everyone was doing! Haha!

We are thrilled with the photos and so glad to have them to remember this pregnancy and special time in our lives. If you live in the Triangle area in North Carolina or anywhere within the vicinity of Saxapahaw, please consider April for your future photo shoots. We had such a great time!

It won’t be long now until the babies are here, so if you don’t see a post from me for a bit, you’ll know why 🙂  We are excited to find out their genders and see their little faces for the first time- it’s been a long wait for these precious little ones!

Filed Under: family