I can't even begin to tell you how sore my body is today, and how freakin' excited I am about it! I spent the last 2 days laying the foundation for our new chicken home! Since I'm hella-cheap, I'm using up all the materials I have kicking around my property before I go buy anything new. Unfortunately for my back, the material we had a ton of, happens to be railroad ties. Those suckers will make a mega-strong fortress for my chickies, but they weigh a ton. OK, they actually only weight a couple hundred pounds. But still...picture trying to drag your husband (and all his buddies) around your yard, and line them up in a semi-organized fashion. Thankfully my genius husband showed me a little trick, and I was able to wheel most of them into place by using a hand cart/dolly/whatever-you-call-it. But then the fun part came when I had to level the ones where the actual coop is going to be. You can't use the hand cart to move them into place for that part, so that was kind of brutal. But I can't have the thing tipped like a sinking ship. Then eggs will be rolling all over the place and my chickens will grow up crooked. Probably not, but it's a little bit funny to think of. Anyway, here's what I have so far...
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| View from our front door of the rough outline of the coop and run before leveling. That part that juts out on the front left with all the scraggly stuff in it is last year's flower garden. Hopefully some of it comes back this year. Can I just say how insanely happy I'll be if I can pull off building a chicken coop AND have last year's attempt at a perennial garden actually return like it's supposed to this year? There wouldn't be words |
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| The rough outline of the coop and run (view from our back yard). |
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| A wicked lot of dirt was involved in the leveling of the future chicken home foundation. Apparently, the "flat" spot in our yard wasn't so much... |
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| Remember when I said I'm going to use the materials we already have before I go buy anything? Well, if you can see in this crappy picture, there are some giant window frames and a few sheets of nice plywood inside my shed, and a whole big stack of old doors leaning against the outside. With some good old fashioned Yankee ingenuity, I think I have the fixings for something grand! |
By the way, as I look through this post, I realized that I've somehow developed the odd collecting behavior of an old man... Why on Earth else would I have acquired 9 old doors, or saved the giant windows that were nailed to the back of our shed (but didn't go to anything on our house) when we moved in, or said to my Mom 3 years ago, "can we have a bunch of those railroad ties?" It's also equally weird that my mom ever had a stash of railroad ties to give away in the first place. But it's all working out now because I'm using all this crap to build an epic chicken coop! I understand completely that that statement doesn't make me sound any less crazy...
Thanks for stopping by,
-Lindsey
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