Our Chicken Coop

This is a long overdue post with photos of our FINALLY finished chicken coop.  We got our chicks in February in anticipation of getting our coop done within 4 weeks or so and moving them into it.  However, North Carolina had other plans, and the wild weather just would NOT let up in March.  Add to the wild weather, a husband's rotating schedule, day to day life and two small children and we didn't finish the coop until today.

.... But I guess I should be a little more honest, I wish that I could blame all of the time delay on the weather, but there were also other issues, like we had no idea what we were getting into and we had no idea what we were doing. Haha! But seriously.

Here's the shed that we started with-- rusty, old, and it had broken doors.  Oh, and it was also FULL of junk left from the previous owners, and surrounded on the outsides by junk from the previous owners.

And here's the transformation into chicken coop-- Leeland chose blue as the color.  If it were up to just me, we would have went with a teal or a lavender, but as we were standing there in the paint section looking at the millions of options, there was a little voice being not so quiet, shouting "BLUE! BLUE! BLUE!"

As much as I would love to let the ladies free range all day everyday, I just don't feel like it's safe for them.  Our yard isn't fenced, all of our neighbors have dogs (some who have been known to walk through our yard randomly) and I want to keep my girls safe, so we opted for a large fenced run.  I hope to do some supervised ranging in the yard, but not without me present.

 A premature photo before all of our bedding is down.  Roosting bar on the left and their water and feed in the back.  We also put linoleum down on the floor in hopes of making it an ease to clean.  You can also see that there is a window in the back covered with poultry netting to hopefully offer a little fresh air/breeze from front to back.  Though the shed was already wired with electricity, so theres also the option to add in a fan or a heat lamp if we ever should need it.

The only thing we have left to do is the nesting boxes.  The girls haven't even begun to even think about laying yet, so we still have a little bit of time on that, and I haven't completely decided what kind of nesting boxes I want to put in yet.

 
The girls are still just getting settled in and figuring out where I moved all of their stuff to, but they seem to LOVE their new space!