De-coop-age
Le Grande Coop proceeds apace.
All the interior walls are in (woot!). Complete with insulation. The wiring is almost complete.
No photos of the progress, however. Every time I thought of grabbing the camera, I was in the middle of holding screws, measuring tape and stick, pens, bits and pieces of 2×4, or helping schlep plywood sheets hither and yon.
Then I’d forget about it until about 1 a.m., so you don’t get any pictures.
You also don’t have any audio recordings of OmegaDad and OmegaMom being very, very snarky with OmegaDotter, who really, truly wanted to help, but has the attention span of a gnat when it comes to "work" and who has recently become enamored of the song "Girlfriend" by April Lavigne to the point where she kept singing "Hey, hey, you, you! I could be your girlfriend!" over and over again until both my easy-going husband and I (much less easy-going) were ready to plunge her head-first into a barrel to stop the "music".
Anyway, it looks like the coop will be painted inside either tonight or tomorrow night, and we can start moving the poor peckish hens out of their (ha, it is to laugh!) "temporary" coop in the garage and into their swanky new digs.
Of course, we still need to make nest boxes.
And there are the exterior walls to finish off.
All I can say is that it’s a miracle no Omega-ite has murdered another over the course of this little exercise.
Firstly, there’s the fact that installing an 8′x8′ coop inside the former stable turned up a lot of interesting…quirks about the stable. For instance, "square" was an existential thing for the previous owners, obviously. The shed is square…the stable growing out of it isn’t. So we had to adjust and adapt over and over again. Parts of the coop are very square. The parts attached to the strange interior angles of the stable are…"un-square".
Then there’s the fact that OmegaDad kept (and keeps) making dorky jokes, puns, and blatant adult innuendo about construction and sexy OmegaMoms. All of which is very sweet, but my eyeballs are in serious danger of rolling out of my head. There’s an amazing amount of sexual byplay that flies right over the head of a 6-year-old child, thank heavens. There were lots of "check out my tool!", and "come hold my stick…it’s a nice, hard stick", and "let’s go out to the coop and screw around, baby!" comments.
And then there’s the problem of timelessness in the endless Alaskan cloudy days. The light looks the same at 2 p.m. as it does at 8 p.m., which led to a number of evenings when we’d find ourselves confronted with a very hungry OmegaDotter wanly saying, "I’m hungry" in a pleading manner.
My advice, for those who plan to erect a chicken coop: Make it free-standing, so you don’t have to cope with a sloping roof that has rafters that are at a slight angle to the main wall and you don’t have to deal with an oddly angled back wall. And you don’t have to shovel out a gazillion years’ worth of horse manure.
posted in Alaska | 2 Comments
