Chicken Coop - Final Improvements

Way back in January I first posted about the improvements we began on the chicken coop that came with the house. That weekend we cleared the run of blackberry brambles, made some small improvements to the access panel to the coop, and painted a single coat.

Now, nearly 6 months later, we've completed the rest of the improvements we planned to make and finally have chickens. Here are the rest of the coop updates we made before bringing them home:

Nick cut a new door out of plywood, which was much more sturdy that the original. This new door also includes new hinges, a bolt that secures it shut at night, and a metal hook and screw eye to hold the door open during the daytime. When I went over the entire coop with a second coat of new paint, I also painted the new door:

New chicken feeder and fount

Nick did the same for the access door to the nesting box at the back of the coop. It didn't need to be a thicker wood so we re-used the existing door, but we did add hinges. Before it was just screwed in and you pushed it aside to gain access, with no way to lock it. Like the coop door above, there's a new bolt mechanism to keep this side more secure as well.

I painted this as well. You can see how well it blends in below. 

Now at quick look at the inside:

The inside was pretty dirty, with chicken droppings and old shavings on the floor and nesting box. I swept out all of the shavings and removed the existing cloth ceiling from the top of the nesting box, replacing it with plywood. After the floor was clear, I pulled out the linoleum lining the coop and hosed it down outside. Once dry and placed back in the coop, I put a layer of fresh shavings down.

While I worked on cleaning and painting, Nick focused on outer security. There were some areas that weren't as secure as we'd like, including the door to the run. The door was surprisingly wobbly at the top and bottom and had only one bolt closure in the middle. To strengthen the door, Nick reenforced it by screwing lengths of wood around the entire perimeter. No more wobbly door. He also added a second bolt closure and changed the location of the original, so now there's one down lower and one near the top.

One all the door reinforcements were added, I painted it and the frame of the roof. We also added a door handle. In addition to the door, we did some spot securing of the wire around the run. This was an incredibly well made run and coop. The wire edging was dug down into the ground at least 6-8 inches. The chickens have dug down about that far in a couple areas and the wire continues even deeper.

I also cleaned the run and coop roofs by hosing them down, removing all the leaves and gunk build up with a power wash. That was around the time I added the new and extended gutter and added rain barrel.

Ready for chickens

And the before shot:

Additions to the Family

I'm no longer the only female around! With Nick, two male cats, and a baby boy on the way, I was significantly outnumbered. Now we are even with the recent addition of 3 hens to our newly-improved coop and run! They are still too young to lay eggs, but we're happy to have gotten them at this stage so we can enjoy watching them settle into their new home and grow a bit before they begin laying. 

Chicken ladies

While my sister and niece were visiting, we arranged a trip to the 'country' with some friends who also needed to get some new chickens to add to their existing two. After some searching on Craigslist, we found people raising free range laying hens and had a large number available, since between us we needed five of them.

It was a really rainy day, so chasing hens around a muddy yard was pretty challenging and funny. It poured rain so hard right after we got there that the family invited us into the large garage nearby to wait it out. That's where they had their heat lamp and area for the young hens (pullets) that weren't yet ready to go outside. These pullets were easier to catch, and my niece was excited to get to play with and hold some of them while we waited:

After the rain let up a bit, we went back out and tried again. They had five different chicken varieties, so we had to decide what we wanted to go after them. Since they were all really good egg laying breeds, we decided to try three different kinds: a Buff Orpington, White Leghorn, and Rhode Island Red. That way we might be able to learn about differences in traits, personalities, and habits of each to take into consideration when we get more in the future, though I hope that won't be for quite awhile. As long as they stay healthy and aren't lost to predators, they should all be great layers for us for the next three years or so.

Nick and the Rhode Island Red, which our niece named "Ashlyn"

Our coop is such a great set up. I'll have to do a post soon to show some of the details and the improvements we've made. The run fencing is thickly lined with weeds on all but the west side, which they quickly got to work on scratching and eating. In addition to those greens, they also get a lot of insects flying and crawling through the weeds and the dirt, and we're giving them select food scraps as treats. All that plus the layer feed gives them a diverse and well-balanced diet. The feed ensures they get enough calcium for egg shell production. We've only had them for a few days but are loving being chicken caretakers, and the cats are enjoying their company as well:

Update: June 30th we got our first egg!

It's now July 10th and we've gotten 6 eggs from the Buff Orpington, who is still the only one old enough to lay. The other two probably have a month or two to go, but soon we'll be getting a dozen a week or more. The shells are very thick, the yolks sit tall and firm, and they are incredibly DELICIOUS!

Rain Collection Barrel for the Chicken Coop

Our property came with a barrel to collect rain water from the large covered backyard patio/roof, which we left as-is. I think it holds 55 gallons, since that seems to be the standard barrel size. It's elevated on concrete blocks and surrounded by fence planking, making it a bit more aesthetically pleasing since it's right next to our patio hangout space:

Eventually we might do something to brighten up the planks around it or something, but it's just fine for the time being. Notice the flowering bamboo/reed-like wall of plants along the patio edge in the above photo. I'll refer back to it later.

We were interested in collecting more water, so recently I picked up a free rain barrel through Craigslist for collecting rain run-off from the covered chicken run:

The free barrel and newly cleared area to the right where it will go

The barrel itself was in fine shape, being a very heavy-duty plastic. The people were giving it away because of a broken nozzle at the end of the very short hose attachment. Regardless of the hose nozzle, I found the existing set up was not very functional because the small plastic spout wouldn't allow for more than a trickle of water no matter what. So we upgraded. Nick used a 3/4 inch hollowing bit thing to drill around the existing drain hole and we installed a regular-sized spigot with an easy half-turn knob:

Concrete blocks found around the yard now have a purpose!

For us to do this meant turning the barrel on its side and me crawling into it to hold the interior piece in place with a wrench while Nick attached and screwed on the outer piece, which must have been a funny sight as I was almost 6 months pregnant at the time, almost 7 now. This is the first mention of it on the blog, so here's a recent photo of me working in the yard, which I'm still doing for several hours a day, almost every day:

Pregnant gardening!

Oh, and check out the patio rain barrel behind my left arm and the area along the edge where those previously-mentioned yellow-flowering bamboo/reed plants used to be. After much consideration and debate about whether or not to keep them, they are now gone. That was about a 30 hour project for me, primarily because the root system was incredibly deep and dense. I added some soil, tilled along the patio edge, and am growing two rows of peas along there on a little trellis. The patio living room area feels so much more open now with a great panoramic view of the yard instead of a wall of plants, which also extended several feet out into the usable yard space. Will make a post on that sometime.

Back to the coop rain barrel. The coop roof had an existing gutter, but it was in bad shape and was set up to empty out at an area where it would be inconvenient to have a rain barrel. We'd rather it be more hidden and out of the way instead of taking up precious yard space.

Before any of our coop improvements 

After removing the old gutter, I painted the wood frame it attached to in order to weather-proof it a little and so it matched the coop, which I'd recently painted with a second coat.

I cleaned out the old gutter to reuse some of it, and picked up a new 10-foot section plus some gutter accessories for my plan. The covered area is about 12 feet long through, so there's a section without gutter. I might add to that end eventually or just leave it as is.

Nick and I attached the new gutter in such a way to fight gravity and send the rain streaming to the north end of the coop and around the corner. Since the coop/run/land is all slightly south-sloping, the gutter needed to be angled sharply in the opposite direction to get the water to run that way, but we got it to work:

Water runs through the shiny and new gutter angled along the east side of the chicken run roof

And around the corner to the back side where I re-used a section of the old, sun-faded gutter

I still need to detach the gutter on this back end and paint the plywood and the run frame like I did to the other sections. Also in the photo above you can see that just underneath the lip of the corrugated roofing we installed a metal extension. Along several sections of the roof water would drip down between the gutter and the wood frame, so we attached this curved metal to ensure any runoff gets directed into the gutter.

And into the  barrel, where I can fill my watering can

With a 10 x 8 foot collection area, we will get almost 45 gallons, or almost a full barrel, for each inch of rainfall. We'd probably get 5 times that from the patio roof. During the periods of heavy rain, we could really use a series of barrels to collect overflow since we would really like to be able to keep enough to be able to exclusively water with rainwater during the summer, but that's a project for down the line.

Chicken Coop Improvements

In early January we had two consecutive weekends of partly-sunny skies and mid-40s temperatures, which gave us a jump start on some outdoor projects. The chicken coop needs some improvements before we can bring home a couple hens in the spring, so we started there.

The chicken run/yard area around the coop was really overgrown with weeds and blackberries, so first we cleared all of that out. Now we can finally walk around inside the entire enclosure!

Here's a before shot from early spring last year, before the yard became overgrown:

Fire thing Nick did was unhinge and flip that wall with the door as shown below so now the little chicken entrance is on the right side of the coop, which solved the problem of the chicken ladder being in the way of the human entrance. Nick also fastened extra gate latches to make the human entrance door more secure from predators. He also attached hook and eye latches in such a way that we can now keep the hinged front wall shown below open and safely attached to the 2 x 4 supports above when we need to clean out the inside of the coop.

Painting was the next big piece. The coop was white, but we wanted something more colorful. We selected this reddish-orange, which kind of makes the coop resemble one of those big red barns. 

Kind of matches Nick's vest too

First coat complete

On another nice weekend we'll put on a second coat of paint, clean out the inside of the coop, increase the size of the access door to the nesting box. After that we'll be adding a removable tray to the nesting box to make it easier to clean and finally line the coop with shavings. Then just add chickens. They don't really lay eggs unless it's warmer so now is the perfect time to get this all prepared for spring.

Pierre checking out the coop

My how the garden grows...

It's incredible how quickly things grow in Portland's spring thanks to all the rain. Just one month had gone by since our last trip and the yard is ridiculous. This will be great once we're living there and able to work on it every day but we've pretty much given up on having any control over it this year. We spent Saturday of Memorial Day weekend in the yard with Dylan and Elizabeth joining us for much of the day. They are pros since they also have turned their yard into a fantastic urban farm. Also they have all the best yard and garden equipment like a weedeater and chainsaw.

We did some fruit tree pruning and think we figured out what we have:
- One dwarf pink lady apple tree (the only one we're sure of since it still has the tag on it)
- One very large and established plum tree
- Three pear trees
- A few small cherry trees that came from seeds fallen from the neighbor's yard
- The biggest surprise was finding out the 3 woody vines at the trellis in the east side yard are kiwi. KIWI! The actual fuzzy kind, not the smaller yet hardy fuzz-less kind usually grown in Oregon. But the vines seem to really be growing well and are definitely several years old. We'll see how they fruit.

And of course the grapes, golden raspberries, and thorn-less blackberries. There is also a small tree of some kind of mystery fruit at the base of one of the pear trees.

Here's what we walked in to on May 25th:

April 27th

May 25th

April 27th

View from the northwest corner looking over the garden boxes.

May 25th

Nick is under the plum tree in the back corner using the weedeater on the small grass patch area. Thanks to Dylan we have a sweet new push mower, but it doesn't work on foot-plus high grass.