So,
Wednesday night after work we ate a scratch dinner of leftovers so that I could mow the area around the coop despite being tired from a hard day at work. I trimmed the grass down HARD, an inch lower than I'd usually mow so that we'd have a good surface to lay out wire on.
Then, Thursday morning by 7:30 we were out there prepping -- DH moving all the tools out of storage and my running the lawnsweeper. By 8:30 my sister and her husband arrived and we got to work. The guys worked on the roof and the ladies tackled the hardware cloth with 15yo DS#3 going back and forth as gopher and assistant.
My sister is a former Air Force AGE mechanic so she understands how compressor-driven tools work and taught me, though my hands are too small to use the heavy fence stapler.
The guys ended up not having to cut any of the metal roofing (and we ended up having 2 panels left over!), but the electric shears were worth the price just for the hardware cloth. This model is anything but ergonomic, but just within my capabilities to control and better than the other one that was available because that one takes out a kerf -- which would mean tiny bits of metal permanently salting my chicken yard.
We started with covering the doors, making generous use of the narrow-crown staples, spaced at about 4" apart, since DH was pretty sure that the fence stapler would split the boards of the old screen doors. As noted above, we covered the entire door on the one that had the kick panel because those panels are thing and held only lightly by trim nails (It's the carport door from our previous house that DH had refurbished half a decade ago so we knew *exactly* how it was constructed).
The wire ended up on the inside of both doors as an artifact of the way the doors are constructed.
I might even go back and put in a second row of staples.
Once the guys were far enough along one roof section that we could work under it, we started on the coop itself.
Measure twice, cut once.
The fence stapler is wonderful, but HEAVY and made for large hands. My sister and my 15yo took turns. I tried but can't hold it up and control it, so can only place staples at a level where I can brace it on my hip -- which isn't very useful.
Due to the nature of hardware cloth we, naturally, have some ripples. The original plans included trim boards, but at the current price of lumber I'm going to take a hammer and the narrow-crown stapler and put in extra staples to tack down anything that's making a gap large enough to worry about.
We got 6 panels done and another cut but felt that we were getting too hot and tired to continue. It was a relatively cool day -- under 90 with not too awful humidity. Had it been really hot-hot we'd have had to stop after lunch.
