I like the tagline for The Taunton Press, the company that publishes Fine Homebuilding (and my employer): “Inspiration for hands-on living.” While the company’s magazines and websites provide detailed instructions for all sorts of projects, I believe their greatest value is in their ability to inspire. Recently I was inspired to tackle a home-building project of a different sort: a hen house.
As a copy editor at Fine Homebuilding, I was hired for my proficiency in areas such as grammar and sentence structure, not for my home-building expertise. Nevertheless, because I read each issue’s contents thoroughly and am surrounded every day by knowledgeable editors who are passionate about everything from design to finish work, something was bound to rub off.
Several months ago my wife and I decided we wanted to raise our own chickens. Chickens, of course, need a secure house for protection from harsh weather and predators. “I can build that,” I immediately concluded—or rather, “We can build that.” My wife works at a school and spends many afternoons designing and building sets for the drama department. This experience came in very handy throughout the project.
After turning one bay of our two-car garage into a workshop, we started building. Not wanting to be saddled with a structure that was too heavy to carry out of the garage and into the backyard, we framed the hen house in the garage but added the sheathing, siding, and roofing on site. Our coop certainly won’t win any awards, but it was great fun to design and build, and our four hens seem to like it just fine.
Now that this project is done, I’m already thinking about the next one: a shed to house landscaping and gardening equipment, bicycles, and, of course, chicken supplies. That’ll probably wait until next spring, though, after I’ve completed some smaller projects that are higher on the priority list.
Inspiration for hands-on living? You bet!
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At this point, the work in the garage was finished, and it was time to put the structure in place outside.
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With one of our sons still away at college and the other away for the weekend, we called on a group of teenagers from our church to help us get the hen house out of the garage and into its final position. The Pepto-Bismol-colored sheathing didn't come that way; I had some leftover tinted primer from a bedroom painting project and decided to use it here, knowing that it would be covered up by siding.
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It's move-in day! While the fourth hen was busy devouring bugs outside, her three companions checked out their new home. These hens are 18 weeks old—teenagers, by chicken standards.
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Wherever we could, we used materials we had on hand. The roofing shingles and blue paint were left over from an addition we had put on our house two years earlier, and the PVC lattice work around the bottom of the hen house once surrounded the bottom of an old deck.
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More leftovers: After cutting up the face frame that surrounded an old attic ladder, I made a smaller version to fit this window. The vertical pieces on either side of the sliding door were cut from trim pieces that used to surround the doorway leading from our kitchen into the living room. Unfortunately, the Pepto-Bismol pink didn't completely get covered up.
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Still more leftovers: Before putting all my tools away and cleaning up the garage, I decided to make a portable pen that will give the chickens opportunities to explore new areas of our yard (and, therefore, have access to new bugs, grass, and weeds) while keeping them safe from hawks. The entire thing was made from leftover pieces from this project and a few other scraps I had on hand.
