Well, this morning is was 5° so it’s finally “warming” up…lol. The past four mornings have had negative temperatures. And the forecast says we’re heading toward more normal winter weather of highs in the mid-30’s to 40ish and lows slowly rising from from single digits into low/mid 20’s in the next week to ten days. Happy day!

People probably think we’re crazy living with weather like this but we love this area and will gladly put up with winter to have our little place in the country. Thankfully we usually only get about a week of weather this cold (maybe once a year). I love the different seasons we get. But I’ll be honest, spring and summer are my favorite though!

So what do we do during these wicked, cold spells?

Well, we heat our house with a wood stove. Thankfully, hubby stocks us up every year with plenty of food and keeps the fire going. Usually our little wood stove is does the job, but on super cold days like we’ve had it feels like it’s struggling to keep up. There were a few days, I didn’t do much better chores outside beside cooking keeping close to the stove. 😉

We do have electric heaters upstairs in the puppy room and in the dog house. If the power does go out, we have a generator. But unfortunately, it doesn’t power the dog house. Although, I’m not going to let my dogs freeze! One year we had an outage for several days so ALL the dogs came into the house and garage. There were crates everywhere since they couldn’t all be loose at once together (boys and girls). And thankfully, we have an older wood stove in the garage so we can heat that too.

So these past few days, the dogs only went out for short potty breaks. And as I mentioned on our Facebook page, we have large litter boxes (think small kiddie pools with pine pellets; the boys each have a fire hydrant in theirs too) in the dog house should the weather be extreme like it has been or we’re away from home for several hours.

Even the big dogs who have double coats and are breeds that are meant to be outside in the cold, only went out for short periods then came back into the garage to hang out.

The cats mostly hang out in the barn full of hay so there is a lot of insulation for them to keep warm in. Unfortunately, they’ve never been really comfortable in the house. Thor will come in for a few minutes, but then wants right back out. He does like to sneak in the garage at night sometimes and sleep with Ben. So it’s a matter of keeping their dish full of food and breaking the water in the water dish and filling it with hot water.

The horses have shelters to get under if there’s rain and they grow very thick coats that insulate them well in the cold. Our newest guy, does not have the fat layer or thick coat that the other two do, so he got blanketed when the temps started to go down. And then I threw blankets on the other two when it got to single digits. And food is fuel to keep them warm so they had food in front of them most all of the time.

We do have a trough heater to keep the water thawed for the horses. Unfortunately, it wasn’t doing its job with the extreme cold because the heater sits at the bottom of the tank. There are floating trough heaters but we had to switch ours to the current kind because one of the horses (*ahem…Jester!) would grab it with his mouth and play with it! But after a couple days of having to go out multiple times to break the ice, hubby rigged up the heater so it sits closer to the surface and is safe from playful horse lips.

The chickens are going stir-crazy since they’ve been locked inside the coop for several days know. We used old grain sacks and stapled them around the door where wind can get through. The coop will need a thorough cleaning but it kept them safe. They go lots to eat and their water is in a heated dog dish. I just had to make sure and pick up eggs mid-day or their would freeze solid.

The rabbit lives in an our tool are between the chicken coop and wood shed so he’s out of the weather, but we still wrapped his enclosure with an out quilt. And I made sure he had plenty to of hay and pellets to eat and de-iced his bowl and filled it with warm water.

So thankful we all survived this year’s icy spell and that the power never went out!