Skip to main content

From Supermax to Chicken Condo

...I've had it backwards all these years. I'm not exploiting [chickens]. They're safe, happy, warm and fed. I'm the one who's miserable....Chickens have gotten humans to work for them. -Lierre Kieth on feeding her chickens on a frozen January morning

For seventeen years, my garage has been accumulating spiders, dust and junk. I've been dodging nails sticking out of the wall in near darkness. Yet after all that time, I spent the weekend cleaning it out and refurbishing it. I'm not moving, I haven't gotten more stuff to store in there, and it hasn't become a rat's nest (not literally, anyway). No, I'm getting it ready for chickens: chickens exploiting humans, indeed.

When the chickens move in, they'll need a way to get from the garden into their new condo. To that end, I took off the north window, ripped off two layers of screen with a hammer and smashed the louvers off. (It was just as well--the sill and part of the window framing were so rotten I threw them in the compost heap.)

Before: Supermax. (Different window, same setup.)
I took off another screen, cleaned up the window, pounded the frame straight, replaced a piece of the garage framing, and put back the window. It's held in place with a barrel latch at the top and some hardware that was above the window. If I need to clean it again, or take it off for more ventilation, it'll be easy. 

After: Even my view of the back yard isn't this good.
There used to be hinges on the window and I was excited to add them, but my hundred-year-old garage has settled and nothing is square. They wouldn't have worked. It might be just as well: an opening of almost nine square feet could let in too much weather. A few minutes after I got the window back in, a downpour came out of the north, the direction the window faces. There was even a little hail. The inside of the garage stayed pretty dry, even next to the window.

Next, I started taking out nails: mostly large, randomly placed, and sticking out with no apparent purpose other than to gouge someone. I literally needed a crowbar to get some of them out. They filled an eight-ounce plastic cup.

Louvre with nails that held the screen in place.
Not all of the nails were sticking out: some of them held shelf brackets to the studs. I had to swing my two-foot crowbar like a baseball bat to get them off. Didn't these people ever hear of pegboard or modular shelving? Or overconstraining? In any event, getting rid of the shelves made another foot of space down the length of the garage.

Nail-free zone.
I happen to like modular shelving. I also like saving money and re-using items, so the plan is to use five-gallon plastic buckets for nests and sturdy, stackable shelves for the condo.
Work in progress.
Next: I need to get more five-gallon buckets and shelves and then build a screen around the area so the chickens stay out of the rest of the garage. Then I need to enclose the chicken garden. My toe is feeling better, so I think I'll be up to it next weekend.

Comments

Lori
Things are taking shape nicely, those chickens are going to love it. The view from the window looks good, I like looking at green it's quite soothing. As I type this the trees I can see out of my window are, yes, you've guessed it ... GREEN.
Those chickens are going to love it - they should reward you with plenty of eggs.

All the best Jan

Lori Miller said…
Thanks, Jan, I hope some chickens find a happy home there. The tree is a New Mexico locust: fast growing, with small leaves that come out late, drop early and break down easily, and fragrant white blooms. The tree doesn't take much water. The downside: it has inch-long thorns. Nature's nails!

Popular posts from this blog

Dana Carpender's Podcast; Dr. Davis on YouTube; Labor Day Sales

Dana Carpender, who's written several recipe books and other works on low-carb, has a podcast and is still writing articles at carbsmart.com. She's a terrific writer and amateur researcher (otherwise known as reading , as Jimmy Dore jokes ). I use her book 500 Low-Carb Recipes all the time and I'm looking forward to hearing more from her. I've embedded her podcast on my blog (click on the three lines at the top right if you don't see it, or go to Spotify or other podcast source if you're getting this by email). Carbsmart.com doesn't seem to have a blog feed, so if you want to see the latest posts there, you can sign up for notifications at their site. Dr. Davis has been putting a lot more videos on YouTube, so I've added his channel to the lineup. Click on the three lines on my blog if you don't see it, or go to his channel here .  * * * * * Primal Kitchen is having a Labor Day sale-- 20% off everything. They sell high quality collagen powder, con...

Fermented bread and butter pickle recipe ft. L. Plantarum

After Dr. Davis said the other night that  L. plantarum  may reduce some of the effects of the herbicide glyphosate (which is everywhere), I'm re-running my recipe for fermented bread and butter pickles. Pickling cucumbers naturally have  L. plantarum  bacteria on them, and fermenting them with some brown sugar multiplies these bacteria. (Just don't use chlorinated water to wash them.) And if you're growing your own cucumbers, avoid spraying the fruits with  Bacillus thuringiensis , or Bt (leaves and vines are OK). It's unclear what effect a big dose of Bt would have on humans. Another benefit of DIY pickles: no emulsifiers like polysorbate 80, which is a common ingredient in pickles. If you have GI problems, it could be from emulsifiers. These sweet-and-sour pickles are the tastiest I've ever made. There's just a little added sugar (some of which the bacteria will consume) and turmeric that gives the pickles their bright color.  Special equipment Quar...

Cardio: A Waste of Valuable Dance Time

"I'd rather hold a girl in my arms than a football." -Joe DeCicco, friend and dancing fanatic Have you heard that it takes a woman 77 hours of exercise to lose a kilogram of fat? (For us Americans, that's half a pound.) That's according to a study cited by Dr. John Briffa .(1) The women who huffed and puffed three hours a week for a year ended up 4.4 pounds lighter than the sedentary women. That doesn't surprise me: my own weight loss involved a lot less exercise than what I'd been doing. I did no cardio workouts, just strength training . I had more time and energy for dancing, which is a stress reliever, helps keep me in shape, and it's a ton of fun. It's not expensive to dance (as long as you stay away from the studios). I've found excellent lessons at clubs where the teachers really care about the students getting it. Here in Denver, there are dancing clubs that are run by nonprofit organizations, where the prices are reasonable and...

Avoiding a Nightmare by Using Math

The answer lies in trigonometry. -Sherlock Holmes Don't worry if you never learned trigonometry--the answers here lie in arithmetic. Medical test results often come back positive or negative, as if the result were a certainty. Of course, there is the accuracy, but if the accuracy is 99% or so, what does that really mean? That you should get your affairs in order? Before you call your probate attorney, let's take an example from the book Calculated Risks by Gerd Gigerenzer. Let's say you're a 40-something year old woman with no symptoms of breast cancer. You have a positive mammogram. What are the odds you have breast cancer? Using some assumptions about test accuracy and rates of disease based on real data, the odds that you'd have breast cancer are one in eleven according to Gigerenzer. (If you were way off, don't feel bad--most of the physicians Gigerenzer tested were way off, too--and they had the data in front of them. Not that that's comforting in every...

Lousy Mood? It Could be the Food

Here's a funny AMV(1) on what it's like to be depressed, apathetic and overly sensitive. Note: explicit (but funny) lyrics in the video. Hearing this song brought a startling realization: I used to be emo, but with normal clothes. Sulking, sobbing and writing poetry were my hobbies. When I was a kid, my mother said that she wouldn't know what to do to punish me if I had done something wrong. And yet things got worse. Over a two-week period in 1996, my best friend moved away, I lost my job and broke up with my boyfriend. I lost my appetite and lived on a daily bagel, cream cheese and a Coke for the next few months. I had tried counseling, and didn't find it helpful; in fact, I found reviving painful memories was pointless. Not thinking about them, on the other hand, worked wonders. Later on, so did studying philosophy and learning to think through emotions instead of just riding through them. But what's blown away all the techniques is diet. Since I s...