Welcome to the McMansion

We discussed all the things we were looking for in a coop in our previous post about Picking a Chicken Coop and how much “fun” it was lugging that huge pallet home in our Getting the Coop Home post. Now let’s look in all the steps to getting this beast setup.

First off, the painting. There are a CRAP TON of pieces. All need to be sanded. Then primed. Then painted. We decided to go with a classic look of a white coop with a gray trim color (which will eventually match our siding). We weren’t exactly sure which pieces went well so our plan was to paint the entire coop white, and paint the trim after it was all put together – mostly because white is a LOT easier to paint over than dark gray. Also fun fact our gray color was called CyberSpace which was totally not the only reason Ben wanted to get that specific one 😉

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SWEET GOD WHAT HAVE WE GOTTEN INTO.

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WE WANTED FOR DEATH.

The other major activity was to improve drainage of the area. Since, for now, we aren’t planning on letting the chickens roam free outside the run during the day, we want to make sure their run area is going to be able to withstand their constant scratching and pecking. From our research leaving the run as just grass, quickly turns to a run of just dirt/mud as the chickens will eat up, scratch and pick at the grass until it’s all gone. Plus they SUPER love to dust bathe and will make dust baths themselves if an area is not provided (and even then, they’re chickens, so they do what they want).

After much research, we decided to go with a sand run. This would provide the chickens with ample space to scratch, dig and dust bathe in, plus have the added benefit of being exceptional at providing drainage during the rain. It also has some fun thermal properties. The chickens have quickly learned to stay cool by scratching off the surface area sand. Underneath is cool and slightly wet helping them cool off quickly. In the winter we hope similar warmth properties will be gained as the sun will heat up the top layer of sand and allow them to hunker down and enjoy the toasty warm.

Our plan was to dig out a “chicken pit” (eliciting flashbacks to a popular computer game that we used to play as kids still play called Minecraft) about 12 inches down, then put about 3-4 inches of gravel, and dump 7-8 inches of river sand on top. Through this quest, we learned a great deal about ALL the different types of gravel and sand possible. While gravel type is less critical besides sizing, sand type turned out to be very important, especially since this is where the ladies will spend most of their time.

There are a number of different sand types which have chemicals added or are chemically treated during their creation which would make them unsafe for chickens. We went with washed river sand. It’s largely unfiltered and has various sizes of grains/gravel mixed in.

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Surprisingly buying sand/gravel was a lot cheaper than expected. It was something like $14 for sand per TON and $16 for gravel. The hard part was getting it delivered. We luckily found someone with a nice dump trailer who was willing to load it up and make the two trips out to us.

MANDATORY PSA: You must, should, always call 811 in Iowa before you start digging willy-nilly around in the ground. We marked a general area with flags and called. They came out in less than 24 hours after our call and had the entire area flagged and marked for utilities. We were able to dig in safety knowing we weren’t going to dig into our electric, water or sewer. It’s free. It’s easy. Just do it.

Next up was digging the trench for said sand/gravel. We stupidly had not purchased a backhoe for our tractor because WHY would we need to be digging holes (ironically our first project with our new Johnny was literally digging this hole LOL). So instead we got our tractor some literal teeth. These expand the capability of the loader to allow for some basic cutting/digging. It’s fairly rudimentary, and was a bit harder to get the hang of vs a backhoe, but we made it work.

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We scoped out an area and drew a very impressive rectangle to mark the general area we wanted to try to stay in. This didn’t have to be perfect, which was TBH, pretty hard for us, as we both like doing things “right”, so we had to keep reminding ourselves:

This is for chickens. Just chickens. There will be poop on everything.

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Then we began to dig. We went right at it with the teeth but quickly found a pilot hole aided in the digging process as it gave the teeth something to actually bite into. So over the course of an entire afternoon we managed to dig ourselves a nice chicken pit with which we could fill with gravel, and then sand before building the run/coop around it. We oversized it a bit by a few inches with the hope that having too wide of a run would be better then having the edges filled with grass/mud. In the end, we pretty much nailed it for scale! We joked how we literally spent an entire day digging a hole just so we could fill it back in! #progress

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So fast forward nearly two months of all day weekend painting, with a few entire weekends skipped due to either down pouring rain OR frosty temperatures. Seriously, Iowa weather needed to get it’s crap together! It was very frustrating and worrisome as the ladies inside kept getting bigger and bigger and there still was no outside home for them. #thisifine #notworriedatall #officeisawarzone

I will also say the hemp was amazing! We used about 1/2 a bag over the course of our ladies 9.5 week stay inside our office. Never changing it. And only the last maybe 1.5 weeks did we notice any sort of odor. We had planned everything out for 8 weeks (which is recommended) but again our Plans and Iowa weather apparently weren’t on speaking terms.

But we got there. Ben’s sister and her family and another family friend came over to help us finish up the last few coats of paint and start in on the assembly. All in all, it took almost four full days of work just to assemble the beast. As it started to come together, we both felt a great deal of pride and excitement seeing our nearly three months of work come together into an actual physical thing! We are also extremely grateful and thankful for the extra set of hands. We definitely would not have been able to accomplish what we did over Memorial Day weekend without their help! <3

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And in the end a masterpiece was formed.

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We moved the ladies out after work a few days after it was completed. We went for closer to late-afternoon in order to give them some time over night in the dark to get used to their new forever home. The ladies were very confused as first, but were very happy in the larger sized hen house (24sq ft). Much flopping in bedding and scratching was had.

It did however take some encouragement to get them to come out and explore. But boy do they love it now!

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