After almost a solid month of weekends where we had other obligations, we finally got to get back to working on the coop. I've been pretty anxious about getting it completed to the point that we could safely order our chicks. I wanted to get them settled as soon as possible as we have an even busier May than we did March.
A lot has been done since the last post about the coop. The trench around the bottom has been filled back in (and yes, I did fall into it one evening while I was looking at some potted daylilies.) I used some bags of pine needles we snagged from my sister-in-law's apartment back in October to put around the perimeter to keep the black dirt from getting tracked everywhere. I'm planning on planting sunflowers and edible peas or beans around the sides and front to help give the girls some shade, and to expand our food growing capacity. It'll make things pretty, too.
The hen house floor has been built and covered in linoleum, and the egg boxes and access door (for cleaning purposes) have been built.
The next steps are the roof installation, (waiting for the order to come into Home Depot) building the door, shingling the roof of the egg box, painting, and installing the latches, chains and locks. We also need to construct a brooder box for the peeps to live in once they come home, but that's a pretty quick process with a rubbermaid bin and a heat light.
You can see, I'm not the only one excited about this being completed! Once he finishes this, Jay is going to build the raised bed for the remaining 55 daylilies that have been waiting patiently for their turn to be planted in a nice new home.
WOW! That is so AWESOME! I feel like such a redneck with my rinky-dink henhouse and chicken tractor. But I am impressed that most of my henhouse was done with recycled materials (that was the goal). That made me happy. I'm looking forward to the arrival of your peeps.
ReplyDeleteI'm impressed with the fact you did it by yourself. I haven't done a dern thing on mine except hold something or use the nail gun a few times. It's all Jay on this one. I would have liked to have done ours with all recycled materials, but given the size of ours, I didn't think it would work to scramble to find all the materials in the right sizes.
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