The Winter of the Outbuildings

This has been the winter of the outbuildings. My goal this winter was to get the backyard ready for spring planting, chickens and hopefully goats.

The first building built was my garden shed. As is true with most of our projects it is only partially finished. It still needs the door and the shelves inside but I am thrilled to have a place in the garden to store all my gardening tools. Erik got it to this stage before Christmas, the winds came and knocked it over but thankfully didn't damage it. It is now staked down and has withstood fairly substantial gusts of wind since then. Oh, and paint. It needs to be painted.

Next we started work on our chicken coop. Or the "Chicken Palace" as I've started to refer to it. I spent more hours than I want to admit pouring of coop/enclosure designs at Backyard Chickens. Then based on a few of them, drew up some plans.
And the work commenced.

Erik has slowly gotten better at delegating through the whole project and so I've been able to hammer quite a few pieces of the coop together.

I quite enjoy it. And it sure beats standing out in the cold just watching.


This is as far as we've progressed. Still quite a bit of work to do but it's getting there.


We've even put down leftover linoleum from our kitchen on the floor of the coop to make the plywood floor last longer and make it easier to clean out. The front here will have large doors that open up (also to help with ease of cleaning). And those holes at the back (the black squares right now) are where the nesting boxes will be attached. The nesting boxes will open from the back so that we can reach in and grab the eggs from there. The whole area will be enclosed with chicken wire and we found a neat door at Cart'm for $5 for the door into the run.


Here's an overview of how the backyard is progressing. It's the view from the backdoor. Eventually the goat enclosure will go back to the left behind the garden shed.
Slowly, slowly projects are getting done.