Cooping

So we ordered chickens.  The Husband decided he would design and build the coop.

The first thing was digging and leveling.  So much leveling.

So much digging.

And we had help.  They got very very very dusty.

(Just a picture of the mountains over my back fence...

(...I thought they were pretty that day.)

This is what the Back 40 looked like before, btw.

This is the sunburn I got while foolishly leveling in short sleeves.  Yes, I am naturally that pale fishbelly color.  I was genetically engineered to live in a bog.

Here you see my shadow and the LEVEL cinderblock foundation.

Here you see the finger I mashed leveling.

The floor, which we built in the garage and then hauled across 4586 miles to the back back yard, where the coop was to be.

We had a handsome site foreman, though.

(Before we let the baby sit on it, we put chicken wire on under the OSB boards, and then put the OSB boards on.  The chicken wire will, we hope, discourage things that like to chew through floors and eat chickens.)

Inspecting the level-ness of the floor.  It darn well better be level.

Then it was Easter!

(The Husband said, "Did you get a picture of the two walls up?"  I don't have any framing pictures of these walls.  Suffice to say we framed them in the garage--they all had to be trimmed--and carried them 937 miles to the back back yard, where we nailed them to the floor.  Which seemed flimsy to me, but then we put some steel ties on them and nailed THOSE to the floor.)

Anyway.  Easter.  Eating candy in your slip and tights because you don't want to get your dress dirty.

Eating candy in jammies and bed-head.

Eating candy with what later turned out to be a fever.

Fancy Easter hair.

Showing off her stickers...

And the Easter dress.

This is the post-Easter playclothes, and a baby doll she resurrected and named Melissa.

The chicks arrived on Easter Monday.  The surprisingly tolerant post office called to tell me I had a peeping package waiting for me.

So I went and picked it up.  This is the chick we call "Bootsie".  S/he is a fancy "exotic" breed that the hatchery threw in for free/because they want to get rid of their exotic chicks/in case a chick died.  S/he has feathers on his/her feet.

She got sick on the same day that Daddy was sick enough to stay home from work, Thursday of Easter week.  We didn't get a lot of coop work done, obviously.

They didn't really care.  They are living in a box with a lamp at the moment.

We got all the walls on; we tried to lift the roof on and it was much, much, much too heavy.

Which turned out to be good, because we realized we had to trim the OSB.  We kinda forgot about that when we were trying to lift the roof in the rain.

See? big square box, no slant?

Enter "sawzall" tool.  Voila, slant.

Then we wrapped it in Tyvek, because if you're going to build it (says the Husband) you should build it CORRECTLY.

We did some finegalling and took the roof apart and put it back together on top of the building.  (I hate pulling nails.)

Looks pretty good though, doesn't it?

Now we just have to insulate and put down flooring (we bought a linoleum remnant to protect the floorboards) and put up the interior walls (doing it CORRECTLY).

And hang the door.  And put in the next boxes.  And paint.

Oh well, it's a nice little three-weekend project. ;)  And I think my husband is pretty smart for knowing how to build it all by ourselves.

Cheers,

Breanna