Chicken Coop

Back in August, I wrote about a little construction project with the boys, a bookcase for our CDs. The result was pretty crude, but functional. At the time, I mentioned that our next project would be a chicken coop. That, indeed, has been the project of the last several weeks.

Peter corrals the chicks.

Peter has a teacher at school who raises chickens and often brings chicks to the classroom. She has told us for over a year now that Peter responds to the chickens far more than any of the other children. Together, she and Peter have been plotting to bring chickens into our lives. At the end of this summer, Noriko and I finally acquiesced and the teacher, Wendy, went out and purchased four baby chicks for us to raise. We are hoping that all four are hens. The chicks are a Rhode Island White (named "Kirby" by Sam), a Black Sex Link (named "Midnight" by Peter) a Brown Wellsummer (named "Peter" by Peter) and a Lakenvelder (named "Metonite" by Sam). They were tiny a few weeks ago, but as you can see in this picture, they are now teenagers. Until now they've been living in a cage, both at school (weekdays) and in our house (weekends), but soon they will be big enough to spend all their time outside. And so the urgency of building the coop has increased.

We're working on a design we saw at the Life Lab on the campus farm. It is a nice little house, with a space for nesting, a nice perch bar, windows and, most importantly, two hinged roofs that allow us to both peer inside and collect eggs for breakfast. The folks at the life lab generously gave us the plans for free, so it isn't quite right to complain that the directions are poorly written. So I'll just say that I'm grateful for that carpenteering experience over 20 years ago (dimly, but just sufficiently remembered).

Stapling on chicken wire for a floor.

We've been going at it a little bit at a time: making the cuts one weekend, assembling the basic frame another. At this point, we're only one or two weeks from the time when the chickens will be able to take occupancy. Unfortunately, this weekend has been nothing but rain and next weekend I'll be in Chicago. We still have to attach the roof and legs, which won't take that much time. Painting it will take up another day, at least. But the thing that really worries me is how long it will take to build the chicken run. They don't just need a coop, but also a space to roam around safe from nighttime predators (mostly raccoons). That's going to take time and another round of ingenuity (dig a one foot deep trench to bury the poultry wire low enough to prevent digging entry? build the run as a fully enclosed chicken wire cube?).

Like the CD bookcase, this is not the prettiest thing I've ever built. But it is an improvement over the first. With luck, this will be another link in a series of construction projects with the boys. I'll post photos when the whole thing is done.

Project Time

The boys aren't scheduled for any camps during the last two weeks of August, so, with Noriko neck-deep in tenure file-preparation work, I was hoping to do something that I called "Daddy Camp." I was hoping to do one relatively ambitious thing a day. I had five things in mind: bike trips, hikes, geocaching, boogie boarding and then practice at ball sports that would be useful for P.E. at school.

But then, the day before Daddy Camp was supposed to begin, Peter hurt his foot. It wasn't anything that called for a trip to the doctor. Just a deep bruise. But it hobbled him badly enough that our enthusiasm for adventure was sapped. We also did a family trip to REI (really, to Old Navy) to buy the boys some new clothes for the school year. At REI I had a chance to test out my growing sense that Peter's bike is too small for him. And, indeed, it appears that it is time to bring him up a size. 

So, the hurt foot put the kaibosh on hiking and geocaching and the bike size issue dampened my expectations for biking. In the end we went boogie boarding twice, but the trips were more like our customary late afternoon trips, rather than an actual outing. 

As we sat about feeling Peter's pain, it struck me that I'd been thinking about Daddy Camp in very simple terms. Just a series of sporting events. I recalled that one of the things the boys seemed to do a lot at their camps this summer was art projects. I never seem to be able to remember that, on a day to day basis, but they really do like that. So I began to think about things that we can do that would be creative or constructive.

I quickly hit on a plan. We have a lot of cds housed in boxes throughout the house, or piled up obtrusively in random spots. They've been stored in those places because we never had a cd storage case that could hold all of them. Noriko had bought one or two small ones over the years, as well as stacked plastic drawers, but none of these options really worked either efficiently or effectively (that is, it didn't mean greater access to our cds). I figured we could build a cd case for the hallway outside our bedroom that could store all of our cds without blocking any passageways.

So the boys and I drew up a plan and went to the lumber yard to buy the (precut) lumber (I didn't want to introduce power saws to the project and I couldn't fit the wood in the car otherwise). When we got home, the boys measured out the spots for the shelves on the risers. They drilled the pilot holes for the screws. They screwed in the shelves (I finished sinking them) and then they painted and decorated the shelves (lime green paint and musical note stickers). As a man who was formerly obsessed with his record collection, I reserved the placement of the cds to myself.

The lumber yard messed up the cuts of the shelves (they are off, from longest to shortest, by a quarter inch), so it isn't the prettiest thing to look at. But it is out of public view and the boys are very proud of their achievement anyway.

So am I.

Next up: a chicken coop!