We have a chicken coop! We finished the essential parts of it just as it started to really snow for the first time.

Previous to this, forty chickens were housed in a “summerhouse” lean-to shack, with 3 open sides. They roamed the property all day, and merely returned to the shack for nighttime roosting. It was serviceable for this in warm weather, but in no way meant for wind and cold or flying precipitation.

posts up

Last week the weather held marvelously, and we worked in shirt sleeves getting the new chicken house up, with 70 degree weather. The weather turned at the end of the week, when we had 3 & 1/3 walls up. The last wall portion took two days, involving the framing for the small chicken door, and two large windows. Those last two days were cold, wet, gloomy, working between bouts of rain and sleet, and trips indoors to shiver with a cup of tea beside the woodstove, then force ourselves back outside again.

Hammering a cold finger is exquisitely painful. Like when your hands are cold and you bump a finger hard against the counter or tabletop, but about fifty times more intense. For a heartbeat, it’s just kindof numb, and you think it won’t be so bad, then suddenly pain takes over in waves. There’s nothing to do but stand there and hold the finger, and yell or swear for a couple minutes. You figure it’ll be black and blue under the fingernail, for how badly it hurts, but a half hour later it’s mostly fine. It’s just the cold accentuating the whack.

framing rafters and walls, under the golden maple leaves

I had been referring to my copy of “Country Women” by Jeanne Tetrault and Sherry Thomas, for some basic building tips. I love how that book is written for women, and un-condescendingly for the inexperienced. As I was building, I felt such an affinity for the things she said about ego, and men and women, and work. About gender roles and building, about how women hold things, while men cut and nail them. It was a kind of therapy for me to have one day by myself, building alone. I grew up in a rather girls-play-with-dolls, boys-play-with-tools sort of family. So when I taught myself to use a power saw all by myself while working on the coop, it was a revelation.

two walls up

It was totally empowering to frame the door and a window, put them in, and put the wall up around it. It was a combination of the basic human delight in knowing you are able to create shelter where there was nothing, plus the dawning of a realization that perhaps I wasn’t as unskilled as I have thought myself to be for so long.

The coop isn’t perfect… it’s a crazy mishmash of odd angles and cobbled together bits. It doesn’t need to be perfect, we discovered. Much of it is reclaimed barn wood from a disintegrating barn. A lot of the siding looked suspect, like it would just fall apart with hammering on it, but with rotten ends trimmed off, most was surprisingly strong and solid, in its delapidation. A couple old cedar boards gave me a hard time with cutting and hammering, and they gave off the most incredible fresh cedar scent, even though they haven’t been part of a living tree for about 120 years. When I looked at the newly cut edges, I could see the hard crystallized sap that looked like a streak of amber running through the wood. No wonder so many of my nails turned on that one.

salvaged door installed, siding and windows going up