Chicken House Details

This creature is one of the reasons for our hard work and inpeneterable fence. His mama pulled one of our Guineas thru a 1" crack in our stall in the barn. She also tried to get another but it got away and had a very broken up foot for awhile but recovered eventually.

We caught three little whippersnappers and promptly took them far, far away to West Branch State Park. Well, only about 2 miles but to a racoon it was far, far away.

You can see the scraps of plywood that I had to use to make the wall. That is why it is not so pretty.

I split the chicken house at about the nine foot mark. They got nine feet I got seven feet. We thought the turkeys would spend a lot more time in there but once we put up the lean-to they all seem to stay outside if the weather is bad. And by bad I mean 30 mile an hour winds and the temp somewhere at five degree wind chill.

The tom turkeys have not spent one night in the chicken house. Even when we had temps of 20' and winds gusting to 50 miles an hour they hung on for dear life up in the tree. Their heads hanging down low with rain dripping off of them. You can see in my videos how they spend the night.

As soon as we put down the straw Cleo moved right in. It was so cute, she just layed right down and didn't want to leave.
Mr. Turkey, also known as "my buddy" (he is the one in the video that pecks me!) hopped right up on the new perches, he is so nosy. Always in the middle of everything. We made the perches out of some small trees that we had cut down. You can also see the two heat lamps, one for daytime and another with a red colored bulb for at night.

We covered the windows with heavy cardboard to stop drafts. I can't wait til spring and I can take it off and see them looking through the windows. There is a thermometer hanging there too so we can watch the temps inside the coop.

Above and below you can see how we spray foamed all the cracks. Next time we will spray between the timbers during construction instead of after.

The sun comes streaming nicely through the roof. We hated to put the chickens in there cause it was so beautiful, the 12 yr. old said he would like to move in!


We bought some fence boards that were really cheap and made our door. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE our door. I just wanted straight boards across, not the slanty ones like a horse barn door has. I understand that the slanty ones hold everything in place but the straight ones look more like an old-fashioned cottage.
A close-up of the door. Kevin is the best at this stuff. I describe what I want and he starts cutting lumber and poof, it appears. Perfectly.
Here we are the day we moved the chickens in! My sister, Amy and the girls and I moved them from the barn to the chicken house after her husband helped Kevin put the fence up. (We don't put pictures of the kids in but one of them took this picture of us.) All went well until the last batch and Amy tripped going into the doorway. She was carring a large wire cage with a fie or six chickens and I had one under each arm. She saved the chickens instead of herself and hurt her leg really bad. Below is a picture of the damage.

Surprisingly, the swelling went down really quickly. It looked REALLY bad at first. Kinda scary.

After the rough looking picture of us I thought I'd better include this one of us all cleaned up and looking a little better. The first couple is my sister Diane and her husband Norm who hosted our Thanksgiving dinner. The middle is me and Kevin and at the right is Amy and Tom. In most cases we look like the picture by the chicken house. I am going out later and take pictures of my fence and the little door that Kevin cut for the chickens to go in and out of their house.

Have fun today everyone!

Beth