Our Coop Experience
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We live in a small rural community in southeastern Illinois. Since we have lived here, we've had horses, rabbits, and the usual dogs, cats, some ducks and a couple of geese on the pond. But never chickens. Until last week - Labor Day 2009. We are now the proud owners of: Ramona, Ruby, Rosie (red mixed breeds) and Blondie, Buffy and Beatrice ( Buff Orpingtons). They were gifted to us by a friend of our son's - what a surprise and generous gift! My husband was raised in south Texas and grew up with chickens around, but I had never had chickens before! Although, I had wanted to for years. This year, in May, shortly after my birthday, I found backyardchickens.com and it took me only a day to ask once again, "Whaddya think about having chickens?" (This time I cited the grandkids as an excuse!) Dear hubby agreed and we were off----like a herd of turtles, that is. The rainy spring kept us from making much progress at first, and we eventually put everything away at one point until the weather cooperated and we had finished up some jobs left over from last fall that needed done outside. We started with an old deer blind my husband built many years ago.
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He no longer used it and thought it would be a good start to a coop. After long deliberation about where we would set it up, we finally made our big push to build a coop. We stripped off the metal siding and insulation and began our work on the shell of what had been the deer blind.
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With not much more left than the framing, we began with a sketchy drawing and a vague idea of what we hoped it would look like when completed.
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And we found some vinyl flooring left from a previous job that went up onto the walls!
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Ventilation came in the form of vinyl windows, one left from the demolition of our old house in March of this year, and a purchased one. Also some 4" openings were framed on three sides of the coop, at ceiling level with hardware cloth on the inside and the outside!
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The chicken door, clean out door and people door were next. And finally the attached run. Digging trenches to lay in the welded garden fence wire and 2' pieces of hardware cloth curled into a "U" shape were also laid into the trench. George, one of our cats is doing his supervisory job as we did the digging to his specifications!
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We did a poll of friends and neighbors to come up with a name for our coop. Our suggestions were: Cluckingham Palace, The Chix Chalet, The Ladies' Room, The Egg-Sit-Era, and Girls Only Cluck House. They were fun to come up with, some were borrowed from BYC and some were the result of alot of thinking, and some came on the spur of a moment! Cluckingham Palace won the poll, but we call it "the coop" most often, and the "little run" and the "big run". We have talked about fencing in an area on the back side of the coop, likened to what you see in the photos on the front side. Thay way we could let them rotate areas from year to year and we could get our garden space back! We'll see what happens! Dear hubby is already talking about "fitting more chickens in that coop!"
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