I can't believe it... the Hen House is finally done!  I started back in May and worked on it during the weekends when I wasn't riding my horse Mickey or taking care of other stuff needing to be done.  I feel like I just took my last final exam or something!  Ha ha.  Short of a little "chicken landscaping" in the run and a bit more shade covering (which can wait till late Spring if I am super lazy) and adding the shavings inside the coop for the deep litter method and hanging the feeder and waterer, I'm finished!  Now, I have to find my chickens!  And, thank goodness for Craigslist.  Since I've been working on this for months, I want hens that are gonna lay NOW!  I will get at least a couple this Friday or Saturday and hopefully more.  My dogs and neighbors will be happy soon and I'll get the enjoyment of keeping them.  I, myself, am vegan and don't eat eggs.  Actually, I have nothing against eating eggs raised like this, but I have never liked the taste of eggs since I was young.  Bummer for me, I guess!  But, since I make all my dog's food from scratch, it will be a wonderful source of protein for them.

The coop itself is 10 feet long, 6 feet wide and 6 feet high.  The run is over 300 sf and the girls should have plenty of room to roam and do their thing.  It has chicken wire across the whole top and about 6 inches below ground.  Where the chicken wire ends underground there is a 9 inch horizontal sheet of lathe layed in the trench which is supposed to cut the paws of coyotes if they try and dig under.  I think the girls will be safe.  If not, I wouldn't know what else to do short of just not having chickens! Inside, I have two roosting bars going across the coop and two corner roosting bars up where the top roosting bar is.  The ladder leads up to the lower roosting bar.  I won the cool nesting box from a giveaway on the blog of "Life on a Southern Farm".  I'll be so excited when I see my first egg in there!  I'm buying a waterer, but am making my own feeder out of an old VW hubcap I've held onto and a piece of stove pipe I bought from the hardware store.  I got the idea from Storey's book on chickens and it'll save me some money and will be fun and quick to make. The art work is just for fun and is made out of plywood.  The two coyotes are howling for the other coyotes to stay away!!  Ha ha.  Putting a good coyote vibe out there. Well, I really hope my next blog post is of my chickens...  I'm just so relieved it's finished and considering I didn't have any plans and just made it from the top of my head, I'm pretty pleased.  I learned a lot and would do some things differently if I did it again, but that's the case with anything you do for the first time.  It was a fun project.  So, for now - JUST ADD CHICKENS!!
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