Sunday, October 25, 2015

Coop: Doors and Windows

As any fool will tell you, a chicken coop needs doors and windows.  For the "front door" into the coop, I wanted to go for a barn door look.  I used some graph paper I found and whipped this up:

I'm sure by now you're thinking, "holy mackerel, this guy's a great pen-and-ink artist, too?"  But if you look closely, you can see a few mistakes.

Anyway, the first thing I did was lay out the 1x4s and swap them around to find a nice fit and face.  Then I marked the lines for the window, and made the cuts. 

Next, I rearranged the boards on top of the 1/2" piece of plywood I used for the back of the door.  With the window hole cut out of the top boards, I transferred it onto the plywood underneath, and cut the hole out of that.  Then I glued and clamped everything up.
 Next came the classic barn door trim pieces, and the hardware cloth covering the window.  The door is really heavy and solid, which lends a certain credibility to the coop, I think.
I also made a screen door into the run by making two identical frames of 1x4" and sandwiching a piece of hardware cloth between them. I got some classic strap hinges for the coop door, and a classy black handle and sliding bolt hardware.  Spring-loaded hinges aggressively pull the screen door closed.  Watch your heels!

In an attempt to give these birds some religion, we decided to incorporate a stained-glass window that Erin made at a class she took several years ago, as people in their twenties are prone to do.

To make a frame for the window, I cut a dado on the edge of a random piece of cedar I had laying around.  The window then fit into the dado running along the inside edge of the frame.

As I figured it, the board was just long enough for me to squeeze out the four sides of the frame.  No sooner had I figured that than I made the old "parallelogram cut" mistake I do at least once on every project that requires a frame of some sort.  Way to go, dummy!


As it turned out, I was able to squeeze four sides out of the board, stupid mistakes aside.  Up it went, right over the nesting boxes.

We also got the nesting box doors on, and mounted suitably-matching handles in the middle of them.




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