Re-cooping Crew

Hahaha. I'm so punny-funny when I have heat stroke! But seriously. 100 degrees today according to Buck's car! Boy am I thankful for our new air-conditioner . . . last year, our house would have never gotten under 84 degrees with it running full steam (electricity :). Today, I took a friend's advice and dropped it down to 71 to get ahead of the blaze. It stayed 71 ALLLL day, amazing!!! It felt so refreshing, and necessary, in contrast to our coop reconstruction project on the hill :)







As you can see there was some major dismantling happening. Muriel was keeping a close eye on the chickens. She only had to be told once not to chase them :) I just noticed her squeaky pig (orange) is in both pictures with the birds. Look at us expanding the farm!





One challenge with the original coop design was that the lid was pretty heavy to lift to gather eggs. Also the shingles kept cracking where they'd get pinched when the roof was open--which meant a lot of water leaked in during wet times, and then all the woodchips under the drip area would be soggy, which meant the floor would be soggy. I blame the shifty shingles :) So with the new plan, we built the coop up twice as tall in the front and used our neighbor's destructed fence door to build a regular swing-open kind of door. It looks very Viking-like for our notso Nordic chickens :)





Graysen took the corrugated metal off of the back of the hay bin, and Buck attached this as the new coop roof. We moved the old coop roof over the open-air section so the chickens can have some shade. All the rest of the wood and chicken wire for construction was leftover pieces from our big coop build and our neighbor's old deck/fence. It worked out perfectly, and was free!





A few (million degree) days later, we added some more improvements. We've had a couple of chickens who were not smart enough to leave the hot coop once they'd laid eggs--well, those eggs were their last. So we decided a couple of vents would be nice for air flow . . . plus the new height should help with heat, too. In the winter the vents can be flipped closed to keep the birdies warm. Good project by Gabby and Graysen!

We've also decided wooden crates are easier to clean and move around. The chickens seem to like them, too. With the new design, we can just sweep all the woodchips straight out of the coop, no more shovels and awkward reaches! Our chicken-helper neighbors came over to tour the new facilities and really liked the improvements. We're all about stream-lining and making this a fun hobby, not a drudgery. I think we did a good job!





Here's the paint job :) We might still paint the shiplap the light gray that matches the "barn," but for now we like the rustic look. Makes our chickens seem more manly. Um, well, you know what I mean :)