Finished!

Yay, the coop is done!  I spent most of the day yesterday with the last details, but everything is done and now the chickens are living in it during the day and just coming in at night which is a relief for all involved. 


Inside the hen house you can see the heat panel that I installed on the “ceiling” that is attached to a thermostat in case they need supplemental heating.  This panel and thermostat I used to be using for some of my reptiles but repurposed it here.  I am going to add pine bedding to the floor over the tile I installed so they have absorbent bedding.  The tile will help me be be able to keep things clean more easily.  It is certainly not a perfect tiling job but my priority was to use every piece of tile with minimal cuts.  The “compartments” on the left are for the hens to nest in when they are laying eggs.  I installed tile on top of these compartments so the hens can sit up there and look out the window.  The window also opens so on days with nice weather I can really open it up.  On the right is the feeder that I built for them.  It is up off the ground and has a relatively narrow opening so hopefully they don’t waste food by throwing it out everywhere.  Behind that you can see a piece of PVC with an orange thing coming out the bottom.  This is the watering system I made that is piped out to a 5 gallon bucket behind the coop.  The chickens can peck at those orange things and it will drip water for them.  This way, they will always have fresh water for many days without me having to do anything.  I am all for low maintenance!

Well, with this project ending, we started on the rocks today.  I wish I had a before picture.  Basically, this part of the house was just an eroded bank with big weeds growing all over it.  Today, I started placing the rock to make the retaining wall.  I am also going to take out the darker rocks above that make a retaining wall as well and replace them with our new rocks.  I will find some use for the other rocks elsewhere in the yard.  Lots of work!  This took me about 5 hours.  Certainly going to be a long project!