Chickens!

This spring I decided I wanted to try raising chickens, and this of course involves building a chicken coop for them to live in. So starting on July 5th I spent about two weeks, mostly in the evenings, going to Lowe's. I also spent some time building a chicken coop. Only July 14th we went to a feed store in Burien and picked up some 2-week old chicks. Of course they couldn't go into the coop, so they lived in a brooder, which is a plastic bin with some wire over it and a heat lamp. As the chicks have gotten older, we've let them out for afternoons here and there in the coop where they love to eat grass and stretch their wings. Apparently chickens get to be pretty decent fliers in early adolescence -- once they start laying eggs (in about 4 months) they'll stop being able to fly as well. At six weeks of age chicks can go into the coop permanently.

We'll post photos of the finished coop and the now-older chicks soon, but in the meantime you can go through all the photos, which have been captioned with building instructions. I bought some instructions online, but didn't want to wait for them to be emailed to me three business days later, so I just started building something I thought would be appropriate. So far it's worked out pretty well!