Coop Building Part 1

What a day!  This post is going to be a series of installments because it turns out that building a chicken coop is much more work than we previously thought.  John and I were up bright and early at 7:15 partly due to excitement, partly due to the terrible curtains in our bedroom and the fact that the sun rises outside of our window.

John's dad showed up just after eight with his truck so that they could go and retrieve the required lumber for our specific coop.  Once they left I cleaned like a mad woman so that once my parents arrived they would feel confident that their daughter was indeed a good, tidy adult and not a homeless degenerate ironically living in a house.

Lumber delivery is very exciting stuff...

Men love trucks.  They will spontaneously gather whenever one is near.

Lumber, lumber everywhere!

Insulation and 2x4's to make a cozy coop!

    Anyways, everyone ended up back at the house just before 10am raring to go.  I knew from the get go that although this was my project and I was the self-proclaimed project manager, I was not going to actually have any part in the construction.  One of those "too many cooks in the kitchen" things.

Getting the walls assembled.

    The boys set to work in the garage and my mom and I went upstairs to tackle the guest bedroom.  We sanded, cleaned and painted for the larger part of the day (more on that later).

Look at that technique!

    Although we had a cut list (a sheet of paper detailing all of the necessary materials, especially important since we needed a lot of lumber from the hardware store), blue prints, tools... lots of tools, and several able-bodied workers, the project still took the better part of the day and we were only able to get half done.

    Today we tackled the right and left sides of the coop and started on the side that will have the nesting boxes.  We also managed to get the holes dug in the ground where the coop will be, allowing us to set up the existing walls (which look pretty sad right now).

Grounds committee... Same as the work crew.  We have a tight budget.

Little brother breaking ground.

I call this "Man Digging Holes."

The work crew!

 Next weekend we will finish the coop  There is still plenty left to do since we will have to insulate the walls, put in the windows, add the floor and roof and assemble all of the doors (whew!).  And the fun part, painting, window boxes and the trim!

As a side note... we are not hoarders.  All of that stuff in the garage is slowly finding places in the new house.  Well, most of it will.

And a sneak peek of the guest room side project...

All of those speckles (spackles?) were holes in the wall.

Mom helping to take all of the hardware out of the window trim