"Winging" It

Wow accomplished so much more during the pandemic. We aren't done yet, but we moved the birds in this past weekend.




As you can see here, predator protection put in all around the coop.







We don't have a garage, and didn't use plans so I had sketched out the design on a napkin then mocked everything up as we went on the ground:

Then we took two weeks off to plan a small COVID wedding since our elopement plans had to be cancelled. We had planned to get married in Thailand, but obviously the international flights weren't happening. Looking at this beach project we did in the middle of our coop project makes we think we are the type of people who are constantly doing something.





My lovely bride did an amazing job decorating our wedding arbor but I don't have any pictures of that. I hauled around 100+ 5 gallon buckets of sand so we could have our beach wedding after all:







I almost ordered some pre made nesting boxes online but just went ahead and figured it out on my own with what I had



You can see there a mocked up roofing truss too. never done anything like that before so it's all been trial and error. It's not that I can't, it's just that I've done a lot of metal work. building hot rods, new frames, body work etc, I've never taken on a wood project like this.




It rained every single weekend I worked on this thing. so as I accomplished more, it was nice to finally have a place to store tools.



I told my wife I should have started by working on the backside of the hen house, where nobody will ever see it, and finished on the front. by the time I built the back door for our closet area, I had become a pro. the first door was a little creaky at first but it's working well now.

Took me a bit to figure out how to actually build the roof.

I realized that I wanted the bottom run of the hardware mesh to be tucked up under the house siding... so we had to do some finagling to get that all back in there. I built this whole project using screws instead of nails because I figured I'd make a lot of mistakes and want to easily undo them.

Almost done. Hardware mesh in the window so that we can open it for additional ventilation.
One gutter hung, I have another to put up.












My wife pruned a branch from the madrona and the birds seem to like it:




as part of the landscaping we repurposed the old close line next to the coop with hammered bronze paint, a wisteria, and a little rhodie.







one thing that is NOT working at all is my feeder. I need to fix this because it just clogs up before it actually gets down to the birds, so maybe a steeper degree of elbow




tucked in for the night

Made a little more progress this weekend. Learned how to do cedar shake shingle siding and have managed to almost complete the whole coops exterior using left over shingles from the neighbors!










Also, experimenting with feed and watering options. I was a little shocked at how fast our birds went through a 5 gallon watering tank, but I think that will slow down once the cornish X's are gone.




I'm still not happy with my feed system, so I need to work on that this week.