Chicken coop = Chickens + Eggs

Next up – the chicken coop!   It scares me a little bit to think about why… but my husband just couldn’t wait to get chickens.  Like everything else, we know absolutely nothing about chicken coops, chickens, or anything farming of course.  But will that stop us?  Of course not.

So, it appears that we are going to take a perfectly fine shed – the one currently housing our riding lawn mower and a chest freezer – and turn it into a chicken coop.  Chuck has read and researched and measured and planned and plotted out his vision for a suitable house for his chickens.  I mostly stayed out of it because I did zero research, eggs mean nothing to me (I hate them!) and I prefer to think of my chicken as coming from the grocery store.

 

Now when I said it was a perfectly good shed, I did that with my new found country girl knowledge of typical farm outbuildings. Look at me talking like I know anything! With most of these buildings the base structure is solid – usually very solid.  But over the years, farms seem to add to the original structure and, well, they are very practical folks who tend to use the materials at hand.  So the inside structure was nearly perfect – but the lean to needed a little work. Apparently the little buggers need a covered area to get out of the sun ( and the snow in the winter ) and still be outside.

If you look closely at some of the pictures you will see that some of the supports for the lean to roof needed a little help!  Now it is not like I didn’t help at all.  I certainly got my hands dirty… sort of. Mostly I just handed over the required tools, and added confusion to all the discussions on next steps.  At times it looked a lot like road construction sights that you pass – where there is a lot of standing around discussing… what I am not sure. We all throw in our 2 cents on what we think is the best method for fixing, uuhhmmm… replacing…. whatever, and everyone praying that it all doesn’t come down on the chickens!

Once we got the outside all fixed up, it was time to start on the inside. I am a really terrible wife, I listened, but I really didn’t absorb a lot.  I know there was talk about building a roost, a discussion on hay versus wood shavings on the ground, where to put the brooding boxes and what kind of feed they need.   Then it was on to lighting (really cool light vs warm light – how can this possibly make a difference to them?), how to give them a sand/ash bath (huh??), keeping out rodents and bears (honestly, the damn bears again!) and building ramps so that they can go in and out.   Next up was talk about fencing, how much room they need to “free run”, best placement for the electric fence and whether that would keep the various nasty critters from getting our happy free range hens.

Honestly, I love the internet, it really is a handy thing but geesh, there is nothing but conflicting information to be had there – particularly when you are talking about raising chickens.  I say this so you will understand that at the end of the day we actually built what I refer to as the Taj Mahal of chicken coops. We will have the happiest chickens on the planet – rockin’ pad, gourmet food, all the sand and ash they could ever need, and nearly a quarter of an acre of electrically fenced yard to “play” in.

Now all we need are some chickens.  Bring it!  We are totally ready!