Planning the Chicken House is Almost Harder than Building it.

I was reading the book "Living with Chickens" by Jay Rossier the other night, and sharing some of what I learned about chicken houses. In response to this information, Ken immediately started planning out the chicken coop. Busily sketching and erasing and thinking and sketching some more until he produced a drawing that was a rendering of a perfectly wonderful chicken coop. Then suddenly he stopped and turned the page over in the notebook and said that he couldn't build that - it just wasn't "us". It was designed as a perfectly standard chicken coop - four walls, perfectly uniform, with an even number of roosts in each side spaced "just so" - everything aligned as a coop should be. So he scrapped it and started over.

Through the night he worked, diligently figuring and configuring, thinking and planning and sketching some more. When I got up in the middle of the night he was still up, working on his plan. He briefly explained that what he was designing would cost about $400 and he wasn't happy with that so he was going to reconfigure and see what he could get that amount down to.

When I awoke in the morning, I found him asleep in the chair and the boys asleep on the couch and the floor. When he woke up he explained his idea and how he planned to build it with materials that we on-hand, right here on our little homestead.



















His plan was to make a chicken tiki hut (but make it secure enough to withstand attacks by the local predatory wildlife - we've named him Rocky and fully anticipate that we will have to battle him in the future). The construction of the Hen Hut would require some sacrifices though; it would come at a cost - the treehouse would have to come down. "I wanted to redesign it anyway" he said.

So the boys climbed the tree and began to tear it down.

And old doors were taken apart...

Then the construction began.

And octagon shape was created and walls were framed and put together.

And just about this time, tragedy struck.
Ken learned the value of keeping his fingers out of the way when shooting brads into boards with a pneumatic nail gun. They occasionally miss the connecting board and veer off course running through a finger.

So he continued to work, until the blood started to get annoying and asked for a paper towel and tape. We wrapped it and he went back to work as the sun went behind some clouds and the temperature dropped even lower than the day's sub-standard Florida temperatures. The temps went down to about 42 degrees as the building progressed.

The sun went down and the temps dropped some more, but they were still kicking strong.

They got up the next morning and went to work on the floor and the nesting boxes.

(That's a brand new saw, purchased for this occasion. When working on a project with this many cuts, you just can't keep up with cordless batteries - it's just better to buy the right tool for the job and get on with work.)

But the low temperatures, throbbing finger and lack of sleep were starting to take their toll and the project had to be put on hold.






The continuation of this story can be found here:
Building our chicken coop part 2: "So What If We Moved the Chicken Coop to...umm. Over Here?"

Building our chicken coop part 3: "Looks Like We're See It Gonna Happen"





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