I posted a couple of before pictures in my post I must be crazy. I would still say I was a bit crazy for starting this but on the other hand, it turned out to not be nearly as bad as I thought it might be and didn’t take all that long either. I started shortly after noon and I was back inside by 2:30. I took a few quick breaks in there to play with the dog a bit and to get her out of my way…and then I almost knocked myself out…but all in all it wasn’t so traumatic considering I’m not much of a fan of bird poo after all the hysteria about bird flu. Actually, I’ve never been a fan of bird poo but that just made me dislike it even more…and since it’s been sitting around for a few months, well that didn’t make my desire grow since there were bound to be lots of spiders and other yucky bugs in there. But survive I did and now I’m here to tell the tale.

I started with the smaller of the bird areas, I guess so I could slowly build myself up for the room which I considered to be much worse. The clean out took about 45 minutes which was not so much shoveling bird waste but more taking down the little bird perches and things like that. there were so many perches on the wall that it was a bit difficult to walk around…which is what triggered me to start taking them down. I couldn’t stand the thought of constantly brushing against the poo, regardless of how many layers of clothes I was wearing.

Here was the finished product of the first room. I know, it probably doesn’t look much different to you than the before photo. But all the perches are now gone from the wall and the bit of waste that was on the shelf and floor are gone. We will hopefully get another large trash container this weekend so we should be able to get the rest of these cages out of here at that point along with the doors and such…and then we can take the pressure cleaner to it and hopefully not end up taking down part of the wall with it.

This room is nestled between the horse stalls and the barn…and the door you see above goes to the wine cellar. We knew already that all the bird waste was causing problems to the stone walls and many of them are going to need to be treated to remove the salt from them. But something even more disturbing from the birds is the picture below.

This is some of the framing for the barn. There was a bird perch attached in front of this so we never noticed this damage before. I can only imagine that the feces started to eat away at the wood and it doesn’t seem like they were taking the majority of the perches out when they cleaned for the birds so there’s no telling how long this may have been like this. It is not completely deteriorated but it’s not looking great so we will definitely need to do something here. It’s also a great place for bugs and other vermin to find their way into the barn (as if there aren’t plenty already) so this is just not good.

After that I moved on to storage room two. This one was considerably worse but still had to be much, much better than doing the chicken coop.

My little helper wanted to be there close by but her idea of helping is eating the bird poop which isn’t going to fly. So I actually had to close myself inside the bird rooms. Joy. Thankfully I’m not clausterphobic but it was still not really my ideal. I’m pretty sure if I got stuck in a room like that, I would freak out a bit…but since there is only chicken wire on this door it wouldn’t have taken much effort to get out.

Remember me mentioning that I almost knocked myself out? Well, it happened about now. I was trying to make sure the dog stayed away (I know, terrible to blame her for my stupidity) while I was working. I had one of the bird perches in my hand, turned to throw it in the trash bag sitting outside the door and ran full force into the beam you see here.

To say that it hurt was an understatement but apparently I have a very hard head because now, just a few hours later, it barely hurts where I hit it. Needless to say I was extra careful afterwards, bending way down to make sure that didn’t happen again. I have to say here that hubby is usually the one that ends up running into something like this. He’s hit his head so many times cleaning out the wine cellar that he often just stays outside while I pass stuff out to him. Imagine how that’s going to work when we finally have that cellar finished…definitely going to need to be careful after having a tasting down there lol.

Anyway, right after I hit my head, my Newfie nurse rushed over to make sure I was ok. I had a little table outside to sit on until the throbbing subsided and she offered some kisses to get rid of the tears. And then she decided that I was not capable of taking on this task alone and she laid down in front of the closed door. Thankfully, it was not too hard to persuade her that I was ok to continue and she resumed her spot in front of the horse stalls where she could keep a close eye on me.

This picture above is an example of why we may not get chickens after all. This was one enormous poop clump which I decided to dispose of exactly like it was. I was using a hand shovel and large bucket to dump transport the waste to the trash container since there wasn’t so much to shovel and using a wheelbarrow would have encouraged the dog to try to “help” even more. All along the edges of the room were big clumps of waste like this…and they all just got packed onto the shovel and marched over to the container which was thankfully not too far since they are surprisingly heavy.

Above is the cleaned out room. It is a massive improvement and I am very happy to know that most of the spider hiding places are now gone. The incline in the ceiling you see in this photo is actually a staircase that goes to the attic above these rooms and our kitchen & mudroom. It seems that at some point, this room was completely open to the attic and they closed it off to use for the birds…or maybe it was always closed off…hard to say. We actually didn’t even know about this room and the one next to it until we bought the house. We were so overwhelmed with all the other spaces that we just never even noticed them.

The room next to this one has stone floors and brick walls. It seems that they even put up a wall between the two rooms at some point…but the bricks look old so it could have been a long time ago. I’m just hoping that under the last layer of dirt and poop we will find stone floors here also.

In case you’re wondering what I did with all the bird perches, they have been moved into the closed off section of the horse stalls where there is already other bird stuff in there waiting to be torn down and thrown out. So since that area is already bird infested and easy to seal off, it seemed like the best place to put everything. Plus, it should be very close to where we put the new container 🙂

P.S. To our parents reading this, yes, I did wear rubber gloves and a mask while doing this. There is no way I was going to let that bird poop touch me…and the mask, although very warm, cut down a bit of the smell so all your scolding us for not always having them on in the past has actually paid off 😉