It all started with a dream. JF ordered a bunch of laying hens and the race was on to provide them with housing before winter.
AS helped BP and I harvest some tamarack posts from his woods. I got stung by hornets but we persevered - felling trees in a U shape from the road around the Hornet nest. AS also donated whatever I could use from a pile of old barn boards on his property left over from dismantling an old barn on his property a few years ago.
For beams I went to a local lumber mill and bought 2x10s. And then 2x6s for the wall supports. I returned later still for 1x3 strapping for the roof. It was much cheaper than buying lumber from the local big box hardware stores. I even price checked.
We elected to go with metal roofing when I contacted a metal roofing place that sold "seconds" at half price. So the roof isn't all the same colour. One side is!
The style is called a pole shed which means rather than putting in a foundation you sink your posts to below the frost line. I used my new tractor powered post hole digger to make this task surprisingly easy. I sunk 10 4 foot deep holes in about an hour. (OK one of them was only 2 feet deep because we hit sandstone the auger couldn't drill through but don't tell anyone.)
As you can see our poles were not perfectly straight so we soon began referring to the structure as either "the eyeball barn" or "The Dave Brubeck Memorial Chicken Barn" in reference to his song "Unsquare dance". Considering the starting posts I think we did a decent job at making things fairly squarish.
Before the roof went on I found it was a nice spot to relax and enjoy the view.
And then the roof went on in a fast an furious weekend and there was much rejoicing.
And 44 chickens now call it home.
And this bad boy is our new rooster. His name is Pedro but I've taken to calling him Juan, as in Don Juan because despite his dismal performance cowering in the corner from the Lord Humongous he is clearly the ladies choice to this point.
In his defense (and probably in defense of his flock) Lord Humongous has contracted mites. So we've had to bath him with diatomaceous earth and quarantine him for a few days.
