Building a chicken coop, pizza on the grill

The talk most of the winter centered on where we were going to house the new chickens that were set to arrive in the spring, bringing our small flock of six up to twenty-one. Why did we need twenty-one chickens? I wasn’t so sure to be honest, but shipping was cheaper if I ordered more, so order more I did. Our original flock enjoyed the moderately serene environs of the suburbs for most of its life, but now that we’re in the countryside, the predators are more legit—fox, coyote, bear—and the odds of us not losing some chickens to nature’s beastly food chain are slim, so bulking up the flock seemed like a smart approach. Considering that two nights ago we heard a series of loud crashes right outside the bedroom window, which turned out to be a black bear next to the garage, trying to get into our garbage, the excess purchase was likely wise.

I’m not sure if you know how much things cost these days (a little joke, of course you do), but a new chicken coop to house this many chickens would cost us about two to three thousand dollars. I told my husband that while I’m no penny pincher (unfortunately), and I don’t mind spending money on things we desire, I could not stomach spending that much on an outbuilding for chickens that was going to become covered in poop, hay and stench within a week. If we’re going to spend a few thousand dollars to add an outbuilding to the property, it’s going to be for a studio for me, where I can take photographs, write, sew and create all the other things I love to create but have very little space to do so currently. Ahem. Where was I….

So my husband and I decided to do what we do, get creative and roll up our shirt sleeves. We turned the horse barn, since we currently have no horses, into a coop by adding some roosting bars and building nesting boxes. As we started the project I thought, why not film this and share with the folks on Substack? An innocuous birth to a new feature I’m trying out, and to tell the truth I kind of enjoyed putting this video together, and while I still need to pull out my camera, not just my phone, and shoot horizontally, as opposed to vertically as this is shot, I already have some other projects I’ve documented ready to turn into videos to share as well. So I hope you like this new format. We’ll give it a try and see how it goes. I’d like these videos to be something you can watch with your children; something wholesome, peaceful, calming, maybe even inspiring, something to watch that fills your cup instead of scares you or causes you anxiety, like so much of what we can watch and listen to these days.

We made a temporary coop for the new chicks in the middle stall, and a revamp of the right stall to house the older chickens and to add the new ones to when we integrate the flocks. When we finished the project we fired up the grill and took some of the dough I made earlier in the day, but of course forgot to film, to make pizzas on the grill, a summer tradition. The older chickens weren’t so pleased with the remodel at first, and told us so by not laying eggs for a week, but they’ve come around and seem to be settling into their newer, more spacious digs by now. The small chicks are growing fast as weeds and we plan to combine the flocks this week, crossing our fingers everyone behaves.

More to come so make sure you’re subscribed if you aren’t already!

Thanks for being here with me, truly.

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