Chicken Coop Done

Before Enclosed

 Building A Coop

Wednesday we went out to the grandparents house to work on the chicken coop. Grandpa had been working on it all morning and my hubby helped him finish it. I tried but I with my limited knowledge of how things work I ended up being the hold this, hand me that girl.

By the end of the day it was finished and we were happy with it. Grandpa was not so he made some changes before bringing it over on Thursday. I need to get a few shots of the completed coop can't seem to motivate myself to do so today because it is rainy and gloomy looking out there. 

I spent seven hours at a grant writing seminar yesterday and then came home and mowed the grass and cleaned the kitchen and moved the birds outside to a temporary pen that I also created after the seminar.  I needed to clean their tub because they had knocked their water over multiple times and adding bedding just was not working. Considering that was becoming common place and I was having to completely change the bedding once a day we decided to leave them outside.

The Finished Product

The finished coop is completely enclosed on the upper half with one large door and a small side door. It also has a drop down ladder so the chickens can get down to the area on the bottom. All 4 sides and the bottom of the lower half have chicken wire to keep out predators. The only thing bad about the thing is it is super heavy and hard to move. 

Last night we put a heavy layer of wood chippings down and put all six chickens in the nesting area where I put heaping piles of bedding. I was very worried they would be dead this morning but they are fine.  They actually seem happier to have a place to move around in. They were all huddled together at 7 am and by 9 they were walking around the upper half. They were in the basement before and considering we don't have any heat on in this house it probably isn't much colder in an enclosed wooden house. 

All in all the coop is awesome! It looks great and it is functional it will just take some muscle to move it around. Once the chickens get bigger we might try clipping some wings and let them run around the yard a bit but for now I think they will be happy out there. When I put them in the temporary pen they seemed to be much happier they were getting very crowded in there tub and they were making a huge water mess every few hours.