We’re into our second deer season at Borrowed Acres and I’m happy with the improvements we’ve been making on the property. This land sat idle for nearly 15 years before we turned it into our hunting club. Needless to say, there was a lot of habitat work to be done and only four guys, with fulltime jobs and young families, to do it. However, in a year’s time we’ve installed five new food plots, cut down about 5 acres of non-mast producing trees to open the canopy in a section of mature pines and allow sunlight to grow briar and honeysuckle thickets — which are already holding deer this season.
Last year we placed an Advantage Hunting Blind shooting house, along with Millennium and Summit treestand throughout the property, on one of our plots and this year our goal was to build another shooting house for a different plot. Eventually, we want to have shooting houses on every food plot. These enclosures are not only nice to hunt from, but they hide movement, especially when hunting with kids, and make hunting in cold or wet weather bearable. A properly constructed house also helps keep your scent inside the house.
We caulked all the crevices of our newly constructed shooting house once we got it set on location and filled large holes near the roof with expanding foam to create a tight seal. One of the best investments we made in our house was installing custom windows from Deer View Window Company.
If you’re not familiar with Deer View, then please check them out. Tyler Ray and his family run Deer View out of Mansfield, Texas and they make very affordable and easy-to-install windows for shooting houses. They have hinged windows that lift up or down, sliding windows, vertical windows for bowhunting, blind door kits, clear windows, tinted windows and more. The windows come in sizes from 12 x 10 inches to 72 x 12 inches. Each window comes with double-strength glass and an aluminum frame. All you have to do is frame in the shooting house for each window. We installed the 36 x 11½ and 48 x 11½ inch windows on our shooting house. Windows start at $15.60 and go up from there depending on size. Take a look at Deer View Windows before you build your next shooting house.
