Saturday, October 3, 2015

Coop: Game of Chicken

Sometime within the past year or so, we started talking about the idea of getting some chickens.  Frankly, our cat was a huge disappointment in terms of being dynamic and self-starting, so we wanted to add something with a little more "strut and head-bob" to the operation.

It came about like most things around here do: I threw out the poorly-formed idea of getting chickens, and Erin researched, planned, and executed the idea.  Soon we were scheduled to pick up 8 newborn chicks on the last Friday in May.  Since that also happened to be my last day at my job, and I was taking two weeks off before starting my new job, it seemed like a good time to get started on building a chicken coop. Boy, I couldn't have been more wrong...

...because it was a great time to get started on building a chicken coop!  We got the chicks and boy were they cute.
We kept them in an unused bathtub in one of our bathrooms.  They required a heat lamp to keep them at 100 degrees F, which gave the added bonus of a nightmarish red pall cast over everything.  The chicks could be forgiven for thinking they were in hell!


Meanwhile, I began laying the foundation for the coop.  The first step was digging a ditch deep enough to put one of these 8"x16" red bricks on edge, then another flat on top of it, forming a T-shape.  This was to discourage predators from digging under the walls of the coop; what with the whole El Chapo thing this summer you can't be too careful.
 
Luckily, there were some really cool tree roots along the way to force us to slow down, take stock, and soak in the excavation experience.
The site we picked for the coop was on a slight rise.  The footprint of the coop is 12'x6', and across the 12' front there is probably about a 6" rise.  With a lot of leveling and crawling in the mud and cutting my hand on some mysterious glass in the ground--it seems we built the coop on an old ashtray landfill--I finally got the foundation nice and level.
For coop designs, I was definitely inspired by the Wichita Cabin Coop, and spent a long time studying the pictures posted by the builder of that coop.  But I also wanted to do a clear PVC roof kind of like this Taj Mahal design.  Doing the PVC roof requires purlins (roof pieces that run lengthwise), and my roof (and entire coop) ended up being different from either of the plans I looked at.

First up, the frame.
Though I'm referring to the whole monstrosity as a coop, there's essentially two parts: a screened-in outdoor "run," that the chickens can recreate in, and the raised, enclosed coop itself, where they will sleep and hide from foul weather.  I added short-length purlins and framed out the floor of the coop (seen here on the right).
My brother-in-law and father-in-law came to visit, and were kind enough to start hanging the screen (1/2" hardware wire) while I continued to frame the coop.


Hanging off the right of the coop would be the nesting boxes, where the chickens would go to lay their eggs, and where our hands would go to retrieve those eggs.  As you can see in the picture above, I made a rectangle, slightly raised off the floor of the coop, to act as a sleeve for the nesting boxes.  Then I could build the boxes at my leisure, in the comfort of my own barn, and slide them in to the coop like an air conditioner.  But that's a simile for next time!

1 comment:

  1. "in one of our unused bathrooms" makes it sound like we have several unused bathrooms thus also making it seem like we have a huge expansive home. Let me clarify by saying there is 1 unused tub in the house which is because it sprays water everywhere when you turn it on. This is where we kept the chickens. They were directly next to the primary toilet in the house.

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