Das Beerhaus

So I worked from 10 till 8:30 on the chicken coop today.  I stupidly decided to do the roof while the sun was out and got an impressive sunburn for my efforts.

The upper part is the coop proper, and below it is half of their run, and lots of nice sand to roll around in.  As you can see from the picture, the roof is just big enough that you can’t do it all from the ladder.  I wasn’t too excited about hauling my 240lb ass up onto this bizarre creation of mine, but it held.  I’m proud of doing this thing for almost free.  The boards at the bottom, and the two posts in the front, came from a pole barn that was damaged in a wind storm.  Most of the rest of it came from my pile in the basement.  The shingles have been in the basement since before I moved in, and the plywood, a full 4×4, and a few 2×8s were leftover from dad’s house.  The window has been sitting in the basement as long as the shingles.  That large crate came from my stepmother’s place of employment, and made a nice floor, and an even nicer wall, so far.  I have never in my life put a window in before, so when I saw there were instructions on this one, I was relieved, till I started reading them.  It read like a manual for disassembling an abrams tank.  So I cut a hole and popped a few screws in it and it looks just fine to me.  It’s obvious to me that this would go a lot quicker with a building plan, but my biggest priority was *FREE* so I just made due with what I had available.  Finished pictures expected in a few days…

Today Casey and Elise went to Columbia to visit their Grammy, so I left Autumn with Lisa and went to work on the chicken coop. I got a bunch of big, oddly shaped posts (near 4×6) from a job, and had a bunch of other scrap lumber laying around, and I turned it into this.
It now has a particle board roof on it, but it was too dark to take a picture of it.  You can see my OSHA-approved blue and white stepladder on the left there.  When I can get some more dirt in there, it will be up to the top of the wooden posts you see laying on the ground there, on the right.  The area on the left (below where the coop itself will be) will be filled with sand.  Tomorrow’s project: finish the roof, and scavenge enough 2×4 lumber for the floor, which I might have enough leftover linoleum to cover.

Here are a few pictures of my soon-to be chicken run.  It is approximately 60 square feet, which is more than enough for the 4 or 5 hens that I’ll be getting.  I’m still not sure what’s happening with the coop.  I have a little shed coming that I might be able to adapt for a coop, or if it won’t work out, I can dismantle it and use the lumber.  Ideally, the coop would be a wooden structure with it’s floor about 40 inches off the ground of the chicken run, approximately half the length of the run itself.  We’ll see what happens.

At any rate, I failed to get a proper ‘before’ picture.  Before I started digging, this patch was mostly dirt and weeks, with several big holes thanks to the dogs.  We have coons, cats, possums, dogs, and God knows what else around here, so I wanted to make sure the girls are safe from any predators.This is primarily why I didn’t build a chicken tractor for them.  I might build one anyway, and get some roasters to put in it.  Since I’m worried about predators, I bought the good, small-holed ‘hardware cloth’  in a 36″x100′ roll.  I dug the entire run out, about 6 inches down.  Then I cut two peices of the fencing to approximately the same length and laced them together with cheap tie wire, which has already rusted.  Getting the stuff to lay down the way I wanted it was the hard part.  I cut the corners out so it would lay down right around the corners.  After I got it laid down in the hole, at about 8PM, in the dark, in the rain, I decided that the hole was only going to get harder to fill, as the rain came down and turned it into heavy mud.

So I stayed outside digging in the rain, in the dark till about 8:30, looking like a scene out of The Burbs.  This is the end result, as of today, after I got the hole filled back in.  Once I get  the frame for the fencing down, I’ll get the rest of the dirt in there and take some more pictures.  I think I’ll end up with enough wire left over to build a chicken tractor, and maybe I’ll buy a few roasters then.

So I decided to get some chickens.  I have a little wooden shed on the way (free!) and I’m going to convert it to a chicken coop.  I have a window for it, I have shingles for the roof, and I have enough scrap lumber laying around in the basement to make whatever modifications are necessary.

The only thing I’m actually going to be spending money on to get it built is the wire (fencing) to keep the varmints out of my hens, and the girls themselves.  Even the price of their feed can be offset by kitchen scraps (less garbage for me to haul to the curb) and weeds and yard-bugs.    So start saving egg-cartons now, if you like good fresh, chemical-free eggs.

I’ll probably be looking for Rhode Island Reds, or perhaps Speckled Sussex hens.  They are both supposed to be cold weather hardy, good layers, and non-aggressive.  And no, I won’t be getting any roosters.  They’re too noisy and I don’t want to piss any neighbors off.  I’m also thinking about getting some hybrids for barbequeing.  If I lived out in the country and could get away with having a rooster, I wouldn’t need to buy hybrids to BBQ, I could just BBQ whoever doesn’t lay enough eggs, just to keep the population down.  Unfortunately, I am still stuck in the city limits, and roosters are a nuisance.

I’ll be loving the (almost) free eggs, and I’m sure the girls will get a kick out of the birds.  I’m sure it will remain a challenge to get Lisa to eat something that didn’t come from a grocery store, but we’ll just have to see what happens with that.