Sunday, August 21, 2011
Heavy thunderstorms were expected to roll in and I'd heard a rumor that I was getting a chicken coop that day. I had been talking about getting chickens for a year or so and my mother always thought it was silly for me. She had gotten a dozen Rhode Island Reds in April of 2011 to essentially replace her aging, mixed-breed (with pheasants!) Bantam Silkies. In fact, prior to her getting the RIRs, she had 1 broody hen and 13 crazy looking Silkie roosters. Out of her RIR peeps, three roosters emerged, the rest hens, with one with some structure issues. The one hen didn't make it and another rooster with bad behavior followed within 6 months.
In my joking around, my family and I would have random discussions of how my grandfather should built a coop for me. Eventually, we had a fairly logical size and shape idea formed and my mom started to come around to the idea. That was three months ago. I'd still talked about having chickens, but I didn't actually know if my grandfather was going to build something for me or not. On Friday, August 19, at a random dinner with my parents, my mom said "you'd better be really excited when you see this thing--it's been revised and redone several times!" I had no idea I was getting it! Apparently, the process took my grandfather two-plus months to complete the project

tbd