I like tools. They seem to follow me home.
Ha ha! That's like me and chickens!
I can't wait to see it finished.
you and me both!
Thanks.
Making progress little by little. I keep hitting snags that cause a 15 minute task to turn into an hour and a half task. But I've powered through a couple of those, and now I have something to show for it.
(Please pretend my chickens don't poop on walls.
)
I got the divider walls attached. Then I took out the middle one so the chicks will have the full space.
I started out trying to make all the dividers the same size with the hardware in the same positions so they could be interchangeable. But it turns out you have to be way more precise than I am capable of. Or at least more than I have the time and patience for right now. So I'm now having it so each divider fits in one spot, oriented a certain way. In the pictures below I labeled the bottom A and the top B. So if I ever want to put that divider in, I'm going to have to find the one with the A and the B on it.
I got the doors added on the front.
The right set of double doors went on pretty easily. Unfortunately, my framing job on the left side was not plumb. I blame that on my wall must be crooked. I just screwed that left 2x3 to the wall and toe nailed it to the bottom 2x6.
So even though I measured the space and made the door to fit, it was too nice and square, and couldn't go in. I ended up planing it to fit. And every time I thought I had it right, once I screwed the hinges on, it was still wrong. Off it came again!
Finally I got it planed down on the three non-hinge sides enough that it would hang and shut and not hit the opposing door. Phew! Then I put the barrel bolts on, and wouldn't you know, they stuck out past the part I had planed smaller!
There really is no wiggle room for these barrel bolts on the 1x2 trim wood. They were the smallest barrel bolts I could find. So, I had to take the opposing door off, and plane that one down enough to clear the metal plate. Well, it's just a chicken coop, right? It doesn't have to be pretty. It just has to work!
So that is why it took me an hour and a half to hang a set of silly double doors.
You can see all the not-straight gaps here.
Oh, and I was using the cheap chicken wire, since it didn't need to be predator proof, but I ran out and had to switch to hardware cloth. (I didn't really run out. The extra roll I had in my garage turned out to be 2" hex, and that was unsuitable for chicks. I did run out of the 1" stuff.) Anyway, the hardware cloth, being stiff and gridlike, was way easier to work with. The frustration of the chicken wire was not worth whatever cost savings it may have been, so in the future, I will stick with HC for these kinds of applications. At least I was lucky enough that I did the two center doors before I ran out, so the two outer doors are the HC, and it's at least symmetrical. That was purely on accident.
Hitting "post" now, before I lose all this typing.
Edited in part:
Hm. If you upload photo files but don't use them, they get added anyway as thumbnails at the bottom.
So, between fiddling with the doors and painting two coats of paint on my window frames, I ran out of time to work on the pop door or the east side brooder/poop board/roosts. But I was able to set up the west brooder with shavings and food and water and move the intermediate chicks in that don't need heat any more, and use their former space that has a mama heat pad for my newest batch of chicks to get them out of their tiny plastic tub. But it was getting too dark by then to take photos of the two groups of chicks in their new spaces. The thumbnail photos show the progress I've made to this point.
But it has taken me until now to learn how to use it. It's pretty nifty!
