Vermont Chicken Coop Build Log - Page 2

Day 2

I had a very productive day. I finished taking care of the stump and filled in the hole. Then I nailed the rim joists together and started working out the exact positioning. I screwed some temporary gussets onto the corners to keep it square. I ran a string from our house so I could get the coop parallel to the back of house. Then I started digging, moving, and stacking rocks. I found a huge one for the front right corner. I was barely able to move it but it was worth the effort. I even managed to keep most of the moss intact. The front is about a foot off the ground and the back is about 2ft on one side and 2 1/2ft on the other. It's pretty close to being level but I have some roofing slate I can use to get it spot on. It'll probably move around a little bit anyways. There's ledge not too far down so I'm hoping things won't heave too bad. Over time I'll probably build up some more rocks, kind of like an old stone foundation, but I want to keep it accessible by the chickens and myself if needed. I might put some straw bales along the back in the winter to cut the wind going under.

I had used my GPS to check the location of the rising sun over the mountains on Dec 21 and it should hit the coop some, it's a bit hard to tell how much right now with the leaves still on the deciduous trees.  In order to get a little more sun we would have had to put it under a huge dying pine, or for max sun put it in a different part of the yard away from the house and electricity. We really like this spot for the coop, it should fit in really well. It should still get a fair amount of sun filtering through the trees throughout the day, and the sun will be a bit higher during the coldest part of winter.


Next I started putting in the floor joists. My wife's busy with our 3-month old girl, so I'm working by myself. Here's a good trick for setting joists by yourself. The block is held on temporarily with screws.


I managed to get most of the floor joists in before I ran out of daylight. I'll finish up the last four tomorrow. Builders will likely notice I'm being a little creative to save wood. Ronyn heard some bears hooting.

We're planning on naming it "Fort Cluck"

My first shipment of hardware cloth should be here in a few days.

Iheartchicks<3 :

YAY! are you painting it? What colors?

I scored some linen white exterior-grade miss-mix for the interior. My wife's going to pick out an interior trim color, she's a lot better with colors than I am. The outside will be stained wood.  We have a big stash of rough-cut pine that we were going to use for raised-beds but I might use it for siding the coop and get more in the spring for the garden. We just moved here from downtown this spring, and between moving and baby we never got our new garden built If I don't use the pine we might do cedar shakes.