After six weeks of overseeing an indoor “chick nursery” we finally got the little biddies moved into their hen house last Tuesday. As you can see, having them make our back porch, a.k.a. “mud room”, their stomping grounds, really started messing with our heads and shoulders.

My dear husband has put so much sweat equity into this new chicken abode…and I’ve learned that the phrase, “It’s like pulling teeth…” really should have been, “It’s like pulling nails…”

You see, I had this brilliant idea. Why not move a lean-to attachment we had–part of a barn that is caving in on our property–across the way to a better location and fix it up into a chicken house? It would be quite roomy, I reasoned, and purty cute after I got after it with a paint brush. What do you think, honey?

My man spent an entire weekend rolling this building up onto old utility poles (we just happened to have a pile, how handy!) and then inching it across our property to its destination. Inching, being the key word. Many times he grunted that he should have taken the building apart, moved the pieces, and then rebuilt it rather than fighting it so hard with chains…pulling it with his truck, having to place new poles constantly to keep the building rolling on rather than rolling off.

Then, once that was done, the real challenges began. Long story short, we ended up taking out the entire floor and rebuilding the joists. While hubby shored up the old floor beams, I pulled nails out in the hot sun so we could reuse the original floor boards. When we finally got the floor reinstalled, we had to build two doors and make chicken wire grids to fit into the two windows to keep predators out. After hanging their light and feed pan from the ceiling beams, we transported our flock and turned them loose! They love their 11’x19′ home…you should see them spread their wings and take off at a dead run! Way better than their previous orange box homes from Aldis!

I’m really thrilled that all 25 chicks have made it a week out there w/out killing each other. Literally. I have five younger Aracaunas and the twenty bigger Buff Orpingtons (gold colored) and Bard Rocks (black) are really concerned about establishing pecking order. Those poor lil’ chicks are having to duck and run to survive.

But they’re happy to be out of their cardboard boxes! And I’m flipping cartwheels to have them out of the house! Bet you’d like to see a picture of that!