Punkinpeep's Chicken Coop

When we first started building our coop, we still had three of our original flock roaming our yard. Here they are supervising the beginnings of construction. When i say 'we,' of course, i mean my wonderful husband, James, did ALL the construction. I offered support, delivered iced tea and sometimes wayward nails. Here is the outside of our coop at its current state of completion...well almost. We have tar paper on the roof to keep the water out until we get our shingles on. That part in the front that looks unfinished is scheduled to become a small covered porch. Won't that be cute? Here's the inside and the part i actually did help with. Paint on the walls....(5 gallons of free white paint from Montgomery Co.'s Recycling program) Linoleum on the floor (half price because it was a remnant) 1/4" x 1/4" hardware cloth on the windows to keep out the evil boogers (59 cents/foot) We actually did not have enough glue for the linoleum project, so i (and i actually mean 'i' this time) used 2x6's from the old well house roof that you can see in the earlier pictures. I de-nailed them, bleached them, painted them, cut them to size, and nailed them down around the border of the linoleum to make sure it's in nice and tight and no moisture gets down beneath it to rot out the floor. I'm kind of happy with myself about this one. I'm not usually the wood construction person around here. Here are the roosts. We used landscape timbers. I did have something to do with the construction of the ledges for the roosts, but some of my work had to be....'edited.' Here is the poop board. It is actually not installed yet, which is o.k. since the chickens have not figured out that they should sleep on the roosts and instead slept in the corner of the floor last night. I think i need to get them a step stool. (A poop board is meant to be placed about a foot below the roosts in order to catch the poop that is deposited during the night. Then the poop from the board can be cleaned frequently, thus eliminating a large portion of the chickens' daily poop from the coop.) And here, at long long long long last, our sweet chickens are finally in their coop. I am extremely happy that our feeder and waterer are now HANGING instead of sitting on the ground getting pooped on/in. And i'm also very happy that i can now actually walk in, close the door behind me, and enjoy my chickens. I'm thinking of finding a stool i can keep outside the door to take inside with me, so i can just sit and hang out with them. I think that will be nice. I really like my chickens. See those big RIR roos? Those are formerly Eva's Triplets! My they have grown. One of them keeps trying to crow, and it's very funny. He has it in him, but when he tries to make the sound, it comes out like a circus clown's squeaky horn! Very very cute! I can't wait until they start crowing! I love that sound! On the floor of the coop, we have lots and lots of pine shavings mixed with food grade d.e. We plan to use the deep litter method, which worked out great this morning. I identified the corner where they all slept and pooped and made a mess during the night, so i got my rake, moved it around a little bit, and miracle of miracles ~~ dry bedding. AWESOME! Reportedly, if you do it right, it dries up and doesn't stink. And you can clean it out once a year when the bedding gets too deep. I'll let ya know how that goes. So, that's my coop, so far! I'll post more pictures when we get the outside all prettied up and picture-worthy. This is Jelly, the future Greatest Chicken Dog in the World, and she approves this message. Just look at her!