After speaking with John at Cedar Creek Barns (sorry, no website), he suggested I come down and look at his sheds, which he would customize into a chicken coop for me if I liked what I saw. Long story short, I ordered an 8'x8', wood gable style shed. It will be stained to match our house, and will also have a green metal roof, too. I ordered it adding 2- 22"x27" windows on each side (total of 4), a skylight, and a transom window over the double door entry. My girls will be having a good amount of light, considering the coop will not be sitting in our sunny clearing, but in a smaller, shady clearing off our main clearing. It should be delivered sometime near the end of this month. Once the coop arrives, I will be customizing the interior myself.
This started yesterday when I started assembling a new metal nesting box that I bought, literally, over 20 years ago. I bought it when I lived in Niles on our 3 acre "farmette", but never even took it out of the box. I have moved it each time I relocated, hoping that I would someday have a larger chicken coop and be able to use it. We had chickens when we lived in Madison, but we could only have 4 hens in the city, so we had a much smaller coop. The nest box packaging, although never having been opened had been battered and had been taped and re-taped to hold it together, but that all ended yesterday when I finally opened the box to begin assembling the nests. Since I had bought it so long ago, I thought it was only a 5 nest piece of equipment, but found out upon opening, it is a "double decker" and has 10 nests! Way more than we need, but now the girls will have even more nests to choose from to lay their eggs.
After opening the box, I found that mice had used the box as a home, so I had some scrubbing to do before I could begin assembling the nests. As if that wasn't enough, the mice had also chewed up and shredded the instructions! Back in the house I went and sat down at the computer to find a photo that I could use for a visual. Seems nests boxes haven't gone through much of a design change since I found exactly what I needed right away.
The beginning.........front.......
and back.......
a little more assembled.......front......
and back.......
At this point I had to quit. Not only did I not have the assembly instructions, but many, many small nuts and bolts were also missing. Were they there 20 years ago? I have no idea, although the box did contain 1 bag of bolts, just not enough needed to complete the project. I'm thinking they might have been missing all this time because one bottom plate (each nest has a metal insert for inside the nest) is also missing, but I cut a piece of wood, replacing it, so no harm, no foul. :)
After purchasing more nuts and bolts this morning, I continued the assembly again this afternoon. Again the front.....
and back......
Once all the metal pieces were assembled, I moved it outside (with Dons help), sprayed it with undiluted bleach, then hosed it down completely and let it air and sun dry. The wooden rails were added last (these each fold up if I would want the hens to use only the top or bottom rows of nest boxes. I'm thinking I may leave them all open and let them choose which nest "they" like best.
Here is another photo which better shows the inserts that go in the bottom of each nest.
The nest box is now ready for the coop to arrive. Can you tell I might be just a wee bit excited to have chickens again? ;)
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