We're building a chicken coop!

Here it is so far. Actually it's a bit further along than this now. I built the nest boxes yesterday and today I made the front door and got that hung. Tomorrow I have to make the back door and a screen window. On the right side I'm going to put a little "pop door" with a slider to let them in and out of the pen - which isn't built yet.

The "attic" area is going to be used to store the garden tools.

Ken's been tied up with firefighter training but he got the trusses up and hopefully tomorrow he'll get home early enough to put the roof on. He has the purlins on one side already and all the roofing material ready to go so it won't take but a couple of hours.

We decided to put it close to the house. It'll be nice to just step outside to collect the eggs but it will also be safer for the chickens. There are so many predators back there around the barn. We lost all of our other chickens to raccoons. They were in a pen with a shelter but the racoons would grab them as they ran close to the wire. We didn't want to get anymore until we had a good coop to be able to lock them up in at night.

I based the design on these Jimmy Vyse Arks available in the UK.

I'm having so much fun! I love building! A bit chilly at this time of the year though.

February Storm

It's that time of year again. Seems every February we get a period of high winds. This year was particularly bad. They brought down lots of power lines and the resulting sparks caused lots of brush and forest fires.

Ken was out with the local fire fighters battling forest fires for 9 hours! While he was gone the power went out then not long after that a terrific wind gust brought down this large white pine that was standing by the driveway. It couldn't have dropped in a better place. Just missed the house. Just missed the power line coming into the house. If it had gone more to the right it would have landed on the chicken coop we're building and if it had gone to the left it would have wiped out the garden fence!

Of course Ken wasn't able to get up the driveway when he returned home but that was better than any of the above scenarios. He took the next day off work and he and Joshua worked on cutting up the tree and getting the branches piled up out of the way.