Day 73
As an inexperienced handyman with little to no carpentry experience, the idea of transforming a horse stall into a coop was daunting. Even with all the YouTube videos I could digest, I still needed tools, assistance, and confidence. Luckily, I got all three things after a simple social media request.
I sent a simple message asking (and hoping) anyone with interstate in helping me with this coop creation. A friend and fellow Ice Age Trail volunteer jumped at the opportunity. He had plenty of tools and even more woodworking experience creating and maintaining trail, so simple carpentry work for a coop couldn't be that difficult
Maybe. Possibly. Hopefully.
When the day came, we came up with a boardwalk. The first step was taking out the bad wood to put in the good wood. Unfortunately, this quickly became similar to peeling back the layers of an onion. A very rotten one. The more we did, the more we needed to do.
Years of use and potential misuse had created a barn in need of an impressive amount of repair. More repair than we expected. More repair than we prepared for.
But the job had to be done, so off we went into the world of wood replacement. We had been acquiring random wood pieces since we acquired the farm, so the costs of new wood purchases was relatively low.
At times, it felt like a game of Tetris as we placed some long beans, sort beams, and everything in between beams. We could’ve practically replaced the whole barn, but we focused on one particular stall that would be the coop for our ten not so little chicks. This particular stall was chosen because it had what we knew our chickens really needed, direct access to the outside world. Of course, this access was in the form of a very tattered and warped door.
I had never considered making a door before I had to. As we made our measurements and checked them again, we found out information that would be confirmed with every step of the coop creation.
Nothing in this barn was square. The array of irregularities made the process more difficult and more memorable.
