Looks can be deceiving

Let me show you some pictures of my girls' rooms.

And if you look closely, you can see that the bottom of this room has tile on the wall, so my daughter was able to write scriptures all over it with a wipe-off marker.

Ahhh...but looks can be deceiving.  As comfy and homey as these rooms look, they are very hot!

If your kids have trouble learning the principle that heat rises, it wouldn't take long in our house to cement that truth in their brain.

So...Doug spent a week cleaning and fixing the "swamp coolers" on the roof so that some air circulation would blow into their rooms.

This one blows into that cement shaft, down to Kylie's room, the living room, and the front sitting room.

This one blows into the shaft, down to Caleb's room, Karis/Keira's room, the kitchen, and our bedroom.

But don't be deceived.  They do not FEEL like air conditioners, even though they may LOOK like air conditioners.

I've been in some homes where these feel VERY cool.

Cold, in fact.

But ours is not as cool for a couple of reasons.

The big reason, is that they sit in the sun, and so the water pouring into them through those hoses you see, gets heated up quickly in the sun.

The water runs continually over the hay which is under these vents, making the hay wet, and then the motor pulls air through the hay (at least that is my un-scientific explanation of things).  Doug could tell you much better.

The second reason is that we chose to put filters on our vents, which is pretty unheard of here.  The air usually flows straight into rooms, with all the dust, hay, etc. that the machine picks up on the roof.

I've heard of bedcovers, etc. having to be brushed off at night before you can crawl into bed.  And since one of the vents is over my stove, I just don't want a lot of foreign objects in our food.  Plus, the filters cut down on the amount of cleaning we have to do, which is always a good thing!

Usually these swamp coolers go straight into a room, like some of my neighbors (see below), and that makes it a lot colder, and when they are protected by a porch like this, they get less "junk" flowing into their homes.

But, thankfully, with a shaft built in, we don't have to have a swamp cooler for every room.



While I was on the roof, I was admiring Doug's handiwork with the tarps.  He blocked all the holes on this "sun roof" so that rain and dust don't come into our make-shift bathroom below.

But I discovered something else on the roof as well.


I told Doug once that our neighbors took our watermelon rinds out of our trashcan, and Doug told me it was to feed his chickens, but I thought he was talking about the ones they butcher.
 
Doug had always joked about taking our leftovers up to the roof and throwing them over the side for our neighbors chickens, but I seriously had no idea what he was talking about until today.  I had never seen this!

We seriously have chickens (and pigeons) living on the roof next to us.  There is even a pen built for them!

          































So, basically, we're surrounded by chickens.

Next door and up floor.

Looks can definitely be deceiving (and maybe I WILL throw my leftovers off the roof)!