Well once again, with all of these leftover stapled together drawers from the "built-in" desk in my kitchen, I decided to make a brooder. This is specifically for my Araucanas from Jody (due tomorrow ). I'm keeping them separate right from the get-go so I can keep track of who is who. What I did was use the drawer as the base to keep in the pine shavings. I then bought the discounted 2x4s from the local lumber mill and had them saw them in half both in length and width (sort of a cross pattern). I kept the good squared off pieces of lumber for other building projects. But then I had a few pieces that had rounded edges, so rather than seeing squares when you would look at them from the top, they were shaped more like pie pieces. What I did was screw four of these sections into the drawer on each of the corners. The rounded edge faced inward so that if the babies bumped into it, it wouldn't be a sharp edge... baby-proofing the brooders. Most people would pitch these pieces since you can't do much with them as far as construction. Unless you got creative and made a nice little nature-esque table and used them as legs. Then I took my 1/4" hardware cloth and enclosed the entire cage. I used screws and washers to hold it in place. The lid is a single cut piece of hardware cloth that I secured only on the back side with screws and washers. To keep the lid down in the front, I'm recycling some plastic twist ties. As you can see, I also added a water bottle and an outside mounted feeder (sold as a rabbit feeder). Wanted to save as much space as I could inside the brooder and have it cleaner. Now to get rid of drafts. Having bought that roll of foil insulation for the old drawer incubator, I decided to wrap that around the outside of the hardware cloth. But, not wanting to blind the poor chickies, I slipped pieces of the foil into manila envelopes, which I then taped down with the foil tape. The only area left shiny that's facing them is around the water bottle, in hopes to draw their attention to the water in the first day or so. The only thing left to do is add a layer of paper towel down on top of the pine shavings to ensure they don't eat them during the first 2-3 days.
Thank you. I'll post pics of the babies in there hopefully tomorrow evening, or possibly Friday morning, depending on when they grace us with their presence.
