Yesterday we got it together and finished the chicken coop. C helped me pull all the boards off the pallets. it took me 30 minutes to pull 6 boards. It took him 30 minutes to pull ALL the boards. Go figure. It took us about 4 hours to pull the boards, screw them on, put the wire on the three sides and screw more boards around them so that the racoons and other predators don’t get them. The only thing we didn’t do is put a roof on, and that’s only because the person we were getting the tarp from wasn’t home.
So now we have a fully functioning chicken coop.
And we only had one major injury. C scratched his back pretty good on the metal wires around the door of the coop. He got himself pretty good too. We cleaned it well and it’s already half healed today.
So what did we do next? We added the chickens. I walked down to my friends chicken coop and rounded up the eight chickens I still had. I’m actually getting a lot better at rounding up chickens. I had the 10 year old stand by the front of the run (because my friend doesn’t really have a door between her run and her coop). Then I trapped the chickens (thankfully mine like to run in a group) with a metal door type thing and put them in a big cage. Then walked them down to the coop. Put in some food and water, closed the door and they were fine!
Until this morning. We come back from our half failed camping trip (watch for THAT bqlog later today) and C goes, “What the heck is on top of your chicken coop?!?!” I look up and the chickens have roosted on top of the almost 5 foot tall coop. We left them there instead of trying to wrastle them back in at 5am. An hour later C was down making sure they were ok because something was messing with them. I think it was our dog running through them on the ground. He like to do that, not kill them, just run through them and watch them scatter and squawk. We brought him in and when I finally got up this morning, at 10, I went and rounded them all back up and put them back in the coop. Tonight I am putting a roof on.
