I’ve added the Fourth wall of the chicken coop, and it turned out quite nicely.
Here’s the back sides:
Here is a good set of Before and After Pictures:
It’s been quite a project, and I’m almost done… all I have left to build is a roof. I’ll be doing that before it starts to rain and snow for obvious reasons.
Oh yea, and here’s a picture of our chickens trying to get some sleep. (The light is from a heat lamp we have to keep them warm on the cold nights.)
More to come later,
Ashton Sanders
When I first got back from camp, I took some scrap wood, 2 by 2’s and a Sunday, and built a chicken coop. It really was more like a box on stilts surrounded by chicken wire. I’ve spent a little bit of time every weekend adding on, and updating it in the hopes that it will become the coolest chicken coop ever!
Here is the first picture I took of my completed chicken coop:
(We stacked the pallets around it for some protection from the dogs, because we didn’t know how ferocious they would be…)
After a couple weekends of upgrading, we got the chicken coop into place along the side wall of our hay shed, and added some planking, walls, etc.
You will notice (above) that the front of the chicken coop is one large door, so we can easily clean it out.
In the image to the right, you can see the side of the chicken coop with a little gangplank I built for the chickens to get into the coop with and a string that attaches from the gangplank to the top of the chicken coop. If you pull on the string it pulls up the gangplank to close in the chickens if we would like to.
My next innovation was even cooler. Here are my custom built nesting cubicles: (Here is a good picture of the big door in front being open.)
And on the back side, I’ve got a secret door so I can easily remove the eggs without disturbing the chickens, or having to open up the huge door in front.
Here is another picture of the secret door on the back of the chicken coop:
The weekend after the above picture, I made the front wall and door of the chicken coop solid (instead of chicken wire). Sorry, no pictures of the process…
But all of those additions so far, are nothing when compared to Anna’s great idea to paint the chicken coop! (Which was scoffed at by some friends lol)
Here is our newly painted chicken coop!
Anna picked out the Red color, and I helped with thinking up the design. You can also see a smaller door I created on the front door. (It’s got the “X” on it.) When I added the wood to the huge front door, it became very heavy, so I created that smaller door for easy access.
Today, our chicken coop has 4 doors, 3 solid walls, and a beautiful paint job.
(Today, we received our 36th egg! That’s three dozen in almost a month! And worth $7.50…. so they have almost paid for themselves…)
More to Come,
-Ashton
Today we received our 11th free egg! That’s right we have 2 egg-laying chickens giving us free eggs!
Introducing:
(Silly) Sally is the most skiddish chicken I’ve ever seen. We call her Silly Sally because if you get within 5 feet of her she starts darting around and clucking frantically as if you are the grim reaper here to collect her soul.
Silver understands that we aren’t trying to kill them, and hangs out a little closer to humans.
We calculated out that 1 dozen “Naturally Nested” eggs costs $2.50 (or a little under $.21 cents) each. We calculated how much money we’ve spent on the chickens so far, and how many “free” eggs they’ll have to produce to break even…
They owe us 577 more eggs. Hahaha. We’ll keep you posted on how they are doing in repaying their debt.
lol
-Ashton
Our First Chickens!!
Well I finally decided to go ahead with it and get some chicks today. I wasn’t sure I was going to get them this year with going to LA twice and being gone a long time for my wedding. So I researched and talked to a lot of people that have chickens and I was assured they were very low maintenance so whoever house-sits for me wont have a hard time taking care of them.
I decided to get 5 as sometimes they don’t all lay at once and I use about 2 eggs minimum a day so I figured if I get extras I will give them to mom. I went with a variety of colors but made sure they were all good layers and friendly. We decided to give them fun farm names too…. so far the black is Buttercup (named by a friend), I named the yellow one Daisy, and still not sure on the golden ones. Ashton’s favorite is the muti-colored brown one, I said she looks like a hawk so that name seems to be sticking. So if anyone has any fun names please throw them my way.
Right now they are in a big box which will hold them for a few months while we build a coop. One of our many summer projects!!
Enjoy!!
