Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Coop



The chicken coop is finally done. I still need to figure out a nesting box but I've a couple of months to work that out. They have a double pane window and insulation and it might be more sturdy than my house. Over engineered is the term that comes to mind. Moving it from the garage to the chicken run and up on the concrete blocks was an exercise in pyrmid technology. Levers and rollers and rope and such. The cement blocks are ugly and I've got a half baked idea on how to make em look better. One thing that was of concern was how to connect the chicken wire so that no animals could get in for a snack. The hardware cloth happened to be wrapped in wire and I was able to use the wire to sew the chicken wire together. It seemed pretty slick at the time, maybe I was out in the sun to long.

This site is a calculator for overhangs. Put in your latitude plus the hieght and width of the over hang and it will tell you what percent of the sun the overhang will block broken down by month.

http://susdesign.com/overhang_annual/index.php


With the chickens taken care of some attention can be paid to the house again. My dad was over earlier in the week and we spent half a day in the crawl space fixing wiring and getting plumbing ready for the half bath. About 4 more hours of crawl space fun and we should be done down there for good.

Spring also brings chores for the garden. Planted a bunch of tomato and peas and the seedlings are doing good. Everything else is going to get to grow in situ this year. Next year they will have a sun room and I'll be able to set out more than two trays.

1 comment:

Jennifer said...

Nice coop, it looks about the same size as mine. I ended up giving the girls a bigger run, because the more grass they ate the less food they consumed. They get mad at me when ever I lock them in the "original" run. It's amazing how picky those little eggers are!

Happy Spring!