It felt wonderful last week to have more time to devote to my homestead to-do list, and I felt super productive!

One of the things that I had been meaning to do for a long time, was fix up some things in the chicken house.  The chicken netting floor was caving in and holes were forming that were big enough for bantams to escape and potential predators to get in (altough none had yet), the walls of the nest boxes were caving in, and the roost bars were sliding around and making 3 roost bars bunch up into 2.

 

I decided to start with the floor. After some brainstorming I realized that it would be too hard to replace the netting on the floor since when Jason and my dad made it, they had the entire coop upside down so they could get to the best spots to drill. Instead I opted for a removable frame that fit the dimensions of the floor perfectly but had extra support so that when the chickens walked on it, it didn’t cave in so badly.

I was lucky that the dimensions of the floor frame would allow it to fit in and out of the door to the house perfectly (with a little squeezing).

I made a frame outside of the house and attached chicken wire to it, using washers and screws to grab the holey netting better.

Then I fit in the floor!

Next I rescrewed the walls of the nest boxes into the base so that  the. Hens wouldn’t knock them over and replaced those and added straw.

Last, I cut some tobacco sticks into short spaces to place between the roout bars so they wouldn’t slide towards each other. This will really help the teenagers learn to roost! Since there wasn’t room up there for them before, they were sleepin on top of the nest boxes. Now they should learn how to sleep like a real chicken!

.:.