Cluckingham Palace

I promised you my chicken stories but I have to start from the beginning.  The "ground floor" so to speak.  You can understand my very tolerant husband's dismay when I brought 10 adorable chicks home from the local farm store.  I had discussed this with Jon prior to the purchase (when I say discussed I mean, I asked him if I could get chickens, he said no, then I begged please and he was silent - which I always interpret as a ....YES!)

So 10 little chickens joined our family and lived in the garage under heat lamps in a livestock tank.  They didn't stay little for long.  As I scoured the Internet for a suitable chicken coop design the chicks got bigger and bigger.  As I walked through our property trying to visualize the most user friendly place to build the coop, the overcrowded teenage chickens were starting to get aggressive with each other.  Only adding to my chicken induced angst was the fact that as the chickens grew, the wind howled and late spring rain and snow turned our normally sandy soil to mud.

After an exhaustive search I finally found a chicken coop that I, oops I mean the chickens could live with.  It was perfect, and user friendly and old school.....and I'm faily certain I will end up living in it at some point.  I found the plans online and I should have known what we were in for when I printed out the plans...all 29 pages of them.  I didn't have the wit to stop right there, I mean I would have only been out the ten bucks I purchased the printed plans with.  No, I hade to run to Lowes with my plans in hand and get supplies.  I figured if I got everything prepared Jon could just well, put it together, right? Just like leggos!  The kid at Lowes looked at the plan, looked at me, then looked at our pickup in the parking lot and announced, "yer not gonna have enough room in that truck, fer all this lumber".  Again should have just stopped right there.

I "presented" my husband the plans and the materials or should I say the first truckload of materials, as if it was a gift.  Here honey I did all the foot work for you, the hard part is done.  At some point I remember Jon saying "I have never built a house before, even a chicken house".  I answered that with, "Ah come on, we can read, we can follow directions, we are fairly bright, right?"  After that moment it was all a blur of lumber and sawdust, and mud and nails, and cuts and bruises, multiple bribes to our kids to come to the country to work and I think I do recall several threats to call a divorce attorney.  In the middle of this process I thought I might as well pick out a wallpaper and maybe some curtains because I would be living out here soon.  I really thought that was the case when Jon wired the coop for lights and heat.  If he plumbed in a toilet I would have really been worried!  My father, otherwise known as Sweden, you know not picking sides, had a front row seat to every last bit of the chaos.  I think he suffers now from PTCCS - post traumatic chicken coop syndrome.

In the end the coop turned out perfect.  Jon did build a house with steel siding and windows and nesting boxes, cupboards and shelves.  The now grown hens love their new digs and took to it very quickly.  Why does Jon still have the divorce attorney's phone number on speed dial??