When is a hexagon, also an octagon?

Never. Never is the answer.

We’re headed up this morning to pick up our chicks from the hatchery and hot damn are we excited! All week, we’ve been chatting about chickens and chicks and making sure we had everything ready. I wanted to go into a bit more detail regarding the indoor chicken coop setup we plan to use while the wee fluff nuggets are growing out their feathers and learning how to regulate their own body temp.

The most common pen/brooder we saw people use online was a large tote. But after researching a bunch, there seemed to be many issues with using one.

• Rate-of-growth. A standard sized tote will have the birds out growing it in less than a week.
• Smaller size. Leads to issues with picking on or pecking each other due to the stress of being overcrowded.
• Lack good ventilation. Tall plastic sides and a concentrated heat source can easily increase temps up higher than baby chicks can tolerate.

Taking a tip from our favorite gal The Chicken Chick, we decided to put our ten chicks inside a 61 inch diameter puppy playpen. This has both a zippered top and a cloth bottom, plus two side doors for easy access. All other sides have a cloth bottom & vented air-y mesh top. One other perk is that the pen folds flat so if in the future we need to bring them inside (say due to cold weather) or we have a sick bird, we have an easy pop-up containment system already purchased!

The core issues is that the bottom is cloth and as you may have noticed me mentioning last week, chickens poop A LOT. So we would need a liner to cover the bottom and sides to keep the chicks poop contained and allow for easy bedding cleanup once they’re moved to the coop! We opted for a tarp as they’re pretty cheap (<$10) and waterproof to keep all gross liquids contained. (*fingerscrossed*)

So now comes the math.

Turns out freehanding a hexagon is really hard. We had one diameter across the center which equalled 61 inches. So thank god for the internet right? On to wikihow!

https://www.wikihow.com/Draw-a-Hexagon has three easy ways. First method required a protractor, which given the size of our project wouldn’t work. Second, required a cup or other large round thing to make a circle with, which again given our size was impractical. Then came option three – drawing a hexagon with just a pencil! Hey we had one of those!!

Okay, so I just draw a line (without a ruler it says, easy-peeze), and then two more angle-y bits… and then just mirror that to the bottom…. okay, but the angles and side length and math….

More googling found a cool method involving triangles. Triangles I knew how to make (thanks one useful thing from my two years of high school algebra class!). So I drew one on paper, thinking I could then use the length of each size to scale up to the length of the size I actually needed for the tarp liner.

*hours later*

Whew I was done and it just hurt my brain a wee bit: hexagons are hard. So I called Ben in to impress him with my L33T math skills.

Ben: That’s really good! But isn’t the playpen an octagon?
Me: *silence*
Ben: I’m pretty sure it is.
Both: *stare at the playpen setup in corner*
Me: FUCK.
Ben: *dies of (totally supportive and not all mocking) laughter*
Me: :rageguy:

So octagons. #thisisfine

Those luckily are a lot easier to draw. Just start off with a square. And cut off the corners. Done. Hexagon. Octagon. But how to do the flaps up the side?

I took to the Googles some more and found a sweet fold-able Hexagon Octagon box with a lid pattern. These were designed to be cut out and the folded up into a gift box. Lid was separate. Which was perfect. It even had sides! Just put the smaller base (floor) hexagon inside the center of the large (floor + size) hexagon and cut/fold corner flaps

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So math and construction begins. We headed out to the shed armed with a permanent marker, a tape measure, a large scrap tarp previously used for a ground tarp, some scissors and super sturdy duct tape.

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Tada! We did it. We made a Hexagon Octagon liner AND it fit. We ended up re-securing the liner to the playpen with safety pins as turns out duct tape doesn’t stick well to fabric. But we think it should work great!

We added in our hemp bedding. Hemp is a topic for another whole blog post, but from everything we’ve read it’s the #1 top most absorbent, odor reducing, low dust, bedding out there. Plus it works great for the deep litter method we plan on using (more on that for another day, once we figure that out haha!)

Next, during the first few days we have chicks, we will need to put down a more sturdy footing material (aka paper towels) to prevent the little ones from slip/sliding all over the place and developing spraddle leg and/or eating their bedding and starving (#birds). We also reduced the overall 18 sq ft playpen down to about 7 sq ft of that to better help them get used to their new digs and be able to locate their three essentials: food water and heat before we open it up to let them have full run of the place.

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Okay, I gotta go wake up the Ben so we can get ready to head up to Murray McMurray hatchery and pick up these little gals. Super pumped and ready for them to be here!

Brace yourself: Adorable baby chick photos come soon!