Chicken Coop Remodel, or How Not to Build a Chicken Coop (2)

To read day one of the chicken coop remodel, go here.

The chickens were completely freaked out by the changes to their home.  The first night, many of them wouldn't even go in the coop.  They tried roosting in the mower shed and on top of the coop yard fence.  I had to catch them and put them in the coop for the night.

In the morning, the chickens are usually out of the coop and clamoring around the gate waiting to be let out.  But after the first night of the remodel, I went to open up the coop to get started on the walls and all of the chickens were just sitting on the roost, apparently afraid to jump down onto the new floor.  I finally coaxed and shooed them out the door.

On day two, we put the linoleum on the floor and put the ceiling up and started on the walls.  On day three, we finished all of the walls.  I didn't take pictures of any of that because, frankly, I was too exhausted to care about pictures.

On day four, Tom had to go out of town and I spent the day painting the walls and ceiling.

I bought some mis-tinted paint at a local surplus store, exterior latex.  The first coat was a very light lavender.  I covered that up with a second coat of white.  I left the corner support poles unpainted because they're old creosoted telephone poles.  I hung a couple of cup hooks on the wall to store some cleaning supplies. Little whisk broom for sweeping away cobwebs and such.  My hope is to do a little regular maintenance so that the filth doesn't build up to an unmanageable level like before.

It won't win any beauty contests, but I think this set up is going to make life a bit easier for us.  The neat freak in me wants to caulk every seam and corner, but chicken coops need plenty of ventilation, so I don't want to seal it all up and make it airtight.  We left a big space in the ceiling open so the air can circulate up through the rafters.  We're going to cover that space with half inch hardware cloth so that it's snake proof, but will still allow airflow.  Still to come...a new, easier to clean roost and sand on the floor instead of the hay that we've been using as litter.  (Do a google or Pinterest search on using sand.  There are a lot of positive things about it, so we're going to give it a try).

Chicken Coop Remodel, or How Not To Build a Chicken Coop

Remember when we first moved to the farm?  Oh, how bright-eyed and naive we were.  Remember the Chicken Palace?  Well, it's not so palace-y anymore.  We built our chicken coop before the days of Pinterest and endless pictures and tutorials about chickens and beautiful, functional coops.  And, we pretty much didn't know what we were doing.  These days, this is what our coop looks like on the inside.

Poop and filth in every nook and cranny.  This is so hard to clean.  At the time, it seemed like such a good idea to use the R-panel tin for the walls.  And, yes, it has served us well since 2009.  But, ugh, it is almost impossible to clean.

The tile floor that I originally laid (using the saltillo tile that we took out of the house) has held up well in the middle, but all around the edges, the smaller pieces of tile have been dislodged by gophers or moles digging tunnels underneath and the chickens scratching around for bugs and such.

I don't know if that's a rat nest of a bird nest, but I know that I don't want it there.  And spiders...eek, the spider webs are everywhere.

Snakes have such easy access that this one felt at home enough to take it's coat off and stay a while.  There are lots of crevices where they can hide and even if we can find them, sometimes we can't reach them to get them out.

Tom was usually the one to clean the coop, but it's such an onerous task that it wasn't done nearly enough.  Even so, he was reluctant to go along with my plan to remodel the coop.  I finally talked him into it and went to buy supplies.  My plan was to put in a proper floor that we could cover with linoleum and put in proper walls to seal off all the hidey holes.

Floor joists, first.

This was a hard project.  Not only did we have a sloping roof that we had to cut the plywood to fit at the proper angel, we had these corner poles that we had to fit the floor around.  It was a challenge. 

But, with Tom's mad trigonometry skills, we managed to get through it with few errors.

Although, the circles were the worst.  

Almost fits.

This one we cut far too big.  Tom filled in the gap with the pieces we cut off.

The fourth time's a charm. 

We finished the floor on the first day.

Coop Remodel Day 2