The chickens have arrived!

Thursday night we finally got our chickens! They are Barred Plymouth Rocks. We
named them Henrietta and Sophie. They were pretty stressed out when our friend
brought them over. He said they probably wouldn't lay any eggs until they calmed
down and got used to their new surroundings. It might even be a week before they
lay any. Well he was wrong. There was an egg in the nest yesterday and one
today! I haven't ever had eggs fresh from the chicken before, but I've heard
they're very good. I'm excited to try them.


Sophie (left) and Henrietta


Our first egg. This is bigger than actual size. It's about the size of a standard grocery store egg.

The scoop on building the coop

Here are some pictures to show a little bit of the process we went through in building our chicken coop.

We first built the floor, then attached the walls one by one. The most complicated piece of this was the back wall, where we were going to install nest boxes. We laid out the framing to see how it was all going to work and piece it together:

Here's what the back wall looked like once we got the framing for it attached to the floor:

See the hands in the picture above? What are they doing? Here is a closer look:

This wall contains the "people door" -- the big door we will use when we need access to the coop to clean and do other maintenance.

So we have the back wall and the wall with the people door. Here is what the front wall was shaping up to look like:

And finally, we have the remaining wall, which we just called "the other wall":

We actually put the front wall on last. Before we did that, we installed our nest boxes on the rear wall. Last year we redid our kitchen and our friend scored us a complete set of cabinets out of a kitchen he was working on. We used some of the cabinets for our kitchen, some for our laundry room, and we had a little piece left. We decided to use that for our nest boxes. Here's what they looked like once they were installed:

Next we installed the roost. We hadn't given a lot of thought to where the roost would go, and the only logical place to put it at this point involved it being partly over the nest boxes. We didn't want roosting chickens to poop in the nest boxes, so we had to cover them up a little more:

At this point it was time for Mr. Chicken (our stuffed chicken) to inspect the construction and make sure everything was up to code:

Once we had Mr. Chicken's approval, we raised the roof:

With the coop structurally complete, we added paint, trim, and moved it to the part of the yard where we wanted it to sit:

Next, we built the chicken run. This was all made from salvaged fence pieces and chicken-wire:

We spread a thick layer of wood chips on the floor.



And finally, here is a shot of the finished doors to the nest boxes, and of the nests all prepared:



Welcome!

A friend of ours is going to be giving us 2 chickens. I thought it would be fun to blog about our experiences raising them. We don't have any kids or pets, so this will be somewhat of an adventure. Hopefully the chickens will survive!

The chickens are arriving as soon as we can finish building them a coop to live in and a run to play in. We have had a lot of problems getting these things ready for them. We are not builders, contractors, carpenters, or whatever you call it. We have made more trips to Home Depot in building this chicken coop than we have in working on our own house! The coop is almost finished. We just need to move it out into the yard where it will reside permanantly. Then we need to build a run, which shouldn't be too hard but that is what we said about building the chicken coop! We're hoping to be ready for the chickens this weekend.

The chickens we are getting are Barred Plymouth Rocks. They are really cute. Their feathers have thin black & white stripes. We are only going to use them for laying eggs. I can't imagine ever eating the chickens. To me, that would be like eating your cat or dog. Ewww!

I'll post pictures of the progress of our coop building and of course the chickens when we get them. Keep checking back for more. Thanks for looking!