Joanna Checking out the Construction
OK, the truth is I don't do too much of the actual construction. Mostly I hold up boards and whatnot while Alex and John do most of the work. That's why I have a cup of coffee in my hand!
OK, the truth is I don't do too much of the actual construction. Mostly I hold up boards and whatnot while Alex and John do most of the work. That's why I have a cup of coffee in my hand!
I am checking out the construction here. I am very impressed with Alex's work (he is a carpenter, after all!). I wish I had that kind of talent!
How does Alex come up with these ideas? (Just so you know, he never even drew complete plans on paper, just sketches: it's all in his head.) Let's hope the coop is as functional as it is good-looking when it's all done!
You can see the inside here, how the lower walls consist of wolmanized tongue-and-groove boards, and the concrete curb that goes around the outer perimeter.
A close-up here of ALex at work. He turned a utility cart into a portable workshop by covering it with plywood and bolting down his battery-operated saw. With the new Ryobi Lithium batteries, he gets hours and hours of work out of it before he needs to recharge.
Since the weather outside was less than ideal, we painted the exterior walls while inside the pole barn by laying them flat over a long utility cart. Because we were painting inside, we used latex paint, which has less-powerful fumes.
This is the dividing wall between the area where the chickens will live and the storage area for hay/straw, feed, and other tools and odds and ends.
This is a photo from October when we started splitting logs for the winter.
Now that the exterior walls are finally up, the chicken coop is really starting to take shape.
You can see the rectangle we cut out of the east wall. This is where we are going to build the roost box, protruding from the east wall, to maximize the interior space of the coop. We'll have to insulate it somehow, or it's going to get cold in winter, sticking out the way it will.
Nothing too exciting here, except for Nissa. She thinks that playing frisbee is an important part of the construction process.
Once the roost has been built, this is where it will extend out from the exterior wall.
Hmmm... I think I was trying to be artistic here, with the branch and all in the corner....
The roost box still needs a cover, and we need to put a net or covering of some sort over the top (to keep chicken hawks out), and then we're about done. The final step will be adding dirt to the chicken yard, and planting some clover seed so that they will have good foraging.
We have 4 different kinds of chicks: Aracauna, White Rock, broiler (meat) chickens, and I think a couple of Banty. I guess we'll know for sure when they grow up!
There are three doors in the coop, one for storage, one a people entrance to the coop, and the third a chicken door.
THe chicks seem to like their new home, a Rubbermaid tub with straw and pine shavings as bedding. Their is a waterer and a the silver disk is a feeder.
The chicks will live in a large Rubbermaid tub for two weeks, with a heat lamp over their head, until they are old enough to fly out, and then they will have the coop to roam in.