Carpentry for Chickens

I've never nailed two pieces of wood together with the intent of creating a permanent structure. In fact, unless you count pictures frames and wall studs, I've never nailed two pieces of wood together at all. And you can't even count that, because you're not technically nailing them together.

Suffice to say that throwing up a chicken coop is a little more of a challenge than it is represented in any of the do-it-yourself literature.

It took us most of the day and no fewer than three trips to the hardware store to get the outside floor joists in. But we also got feed bins and completed preparations for the chicks' arrival this week. Well, almost. I plugged in the heater we got and - bupkiss. Nothing. No heat. *sigh* Back to the feed store to tell them that we need a new element for the heater. They're pretty nice there, I'm sure they'll be good about it.

I've been reading up a lot on chickens and their care and feeding, and I think I'm to the point where I've assimilated a lot of good information, and now I'm just overthinking things. Start over again with a new flock every spring, not mingling the new chicks with the established flock, avoiding diseases and problems like cannibalism...there are tons of things that I think "how on earth did chickens ever survive in the wild if this is a problem?" But I have to remember that a lot of the advice given is for people who, I think, are far more concerned about some performance metric (number of eggs laid, pounds of meat per pound of feed, beauty and showability of birds) than am I. I'm to the point where I'm starting to think that I just need to figure stuff out on my own.

Next step: framing the sides. We have the lumber, we have the plans...we're waiting for the energy!