Treehouse to Coop

My family moved into our house about 27 years ago.  I just turned 25.  When I was very little, my dad and two brothers built a treehouse.  I guess building it was just supposed to be a bonding experience because they didn't use the treehouse very much, and they certainly wouldn't let me play in it when I was big enough.  So it's been sitting down in the yard for over two decades, rotting away and being used only by a family of raccoons for a while.  Eventually we started throwing yard junk down there to help keep it out of the rain.  This is what the treehouse looked like five months ago before Mission Chicken Coop began:

Step one was to remove all the junk from underneath:

Now we actually have access to the treehouse again!  The next step involved convincing my boyfriend to climb up into that nasty, rotting treehouse and demolish it.  For free.  Well, we fed him.  And I supervised the demolition.  So first he took the treehouse door down and knocked off the front side of the structure:

Slowly but surely, all four sides and the roof came down.  The left side of the structure was the last to be demolished, and he was able to knock it down in one big section.  This picture doesn't show what's really happening here, but when he knocked the side down, it got stuck on a single nail.  A single nail is holding this whole side of the treehouse up!  That was one stubborn twenty-some-year-old nail.

I think this is where we left it after day one:

After one weekend, the treehouse was almost completely taken down by our one-man demo crew:

The biggest obstacles in Mission Chicken Coop were the trees.  I guess we started this project right in the busiest part of the tree-cutting season, so it took at least a couple months to get a tree cutting service to not only give us an estimate but to actually show up and follow through with the job.  This root was pretty difficult too - and it broke the polesaw!

Waiting to get the trees cut down put us on pause for quite a while, but once they were out of the way, my dad and brother put up the new roof:

During this process, the original structure was ripped down to the retaining wall (which was then reinforced), the six vertical posts (which were cut down to fit the new roof), and some of the bracing around the ceiling.  Also, there was nothing we could do about that big boulder, but I like it there.

After the roof went up, the floor needed to go down.  We had to fill in the side where that tree root had been in order to level out the ground.  My dad and brothers added wire fencing around the entire floor and covered up the edges so they wouldn't hurt any chicken feet.  We also custom-built a door to fit the space so it was wide enough to carry the hen house through.

Not only did we need to build the chicken coop, but we also had to build the hen house.  And that was primarily my dad's project.  My mom and I did research and had many discussions about what we wanted our hen house to include, but it was really my dad who drew up the plans and made them a reality.  Here is a picture of the inside of the hen house before we did any painting and before we installed the nesting boxes and put down the bedding (the chickens LOVE those uneven roosting bars):

Start with a treehouse, then subtract the second level, add a new roof, new floor, new vertical beams, new door, enclose the whole structure, then carry in a hen house, and this is what you get:

But we're not done yet!  After everything was built, we had to paint and weatherproof the new roof and hen house.  We also added little strips of wire fencing around the spaces near the roof and above the door so no critters could climb in.  My dad brought in two truckloads of sand that we started to spread on the floor to cover the wire.

We installed some extra hooks to hold our rake and chairs up off the ground (so they wouldn't get pooped on!).

We also installed a couple little shelves on the front side so we can set our coffee cups down when we sit in the coop with the chickens.  And now it's all done!  After more than four months, Mission Chicken Coop is complete.  The chickens seem really happy to be in their new home and we're having a lot of fun sitting in the coop with them every day.  When they squawk at us, we squawk back.

Just so you can see a quick comparison of the before and after, here's that first picture again:

Our first eggs!

I got home from work today, made a cup of coffee, and took it down to the chicken coop to hang out with the girls.  They were squawking and pecking at my toes and being especially rowdy.  At some point, I decided to check out the inside of the hen house, so I stuck my head halfway through the front door, looked to my right toward the nesting boxes, then looked to the left and saw... omg, what is that round thing?  It's an egg!  Omg, there's another one!  Our first two eggs!

Our two Amber Links (the white chickens) seem a little more mature than the other chickens, so I suspect they are the ones who laid the first two eggs today.  We're almost positive the hen house was eggless yesterday, which means two chickens are mature enough to lay.  The girls are only four months old, so we didn't think they would be laying until the fall.

Bernice, did you lay this egg?

What about you, Oneita?

You're supposed to lay them inside the nesting boxes!  I guess they did pretty good for their first eggs, even though they laid them in the wrong part of the hen house.