Sorry it’s been so long, the move was much more complicated than we anticipated!  Then Summer took over, trips, beach time, football practice….you know how it is!

 

Here are some pictures of the girls new home.  My better half did a great job constructing it.  We did do a modification though and incorporated the nesting boxed inside the main structure.

 

Outside he built a grass box, a chicken swing and a rock box to set the waterer on to help keep the girls feet dry when they spill.

 

Inside he built two roosting bars, two removable poop trays (that we filled with sand for easy clean up….if you have to scoop poop, it might as well feel like a Zen box, right?), a ramp for easy climbing access and five nesting boxes with roost bar entry. A later addition included a shelf overhead for storage which proved helpful for straw and hay but not food (lifting 50 pound bags while standing on my tippy toes didn’t work so well…) so a plastic storage tub was added under the nesting boxes.

 

Speaking of nesting boxes, they are just over a foot wide with privacy dividers in between (I mean, would you want your cousins watching you pop out eggs?).  Each nesting box is a dollar store dish washing tub with one end cut off for easy cleaning and filled with straw.  The girls seem to like to throw ninety percent of the straw on the floor and sit in plastic….to each his own…but I keep filling them up if for no other reason than they seem to enjoy tossing the straw while they sit…..

 

A few things we learned, in the run, our girls tore up the earth.  This made it especially messy on rainy days.  We will address this next Spring with some more rocks inside the run.  They needed more shade than the trees provided.  We put up a tarp for the hottest days, but it filled with rain and smelled bad (and was a breeding ground for mosquitos)!  Next Summer we will devise some sort of cover for a portion of the run. The slide door for them to go in and out gets clogged with dirt and can’t be moved from outside and you have to go in to slide it closed sometimes, not sure there is an easy fix for this, but I keep searching Pinterest in the hope of a solution!

 

On the inside, the ramp gets in the way when cleaning and needs to be detachable.  The poop trays get very heavy with the sand and occasionally spillage occurs when we are removing them.  I don’t like poop on my chore boots, so we will need to reconfigure them eventually.

 

How do you manage your coop and run?  Any suggestions?

 

Thanks for visiting and have a great day!