This is a chicken house my dad and I built to replace the old one with the tile cupola. They don’t live in there, it’s just a place to sleep and a place to keep their food dry and a place to lay eggs (if the lazy birds ever start laying again.) I cut most of the structural pieces out of scrap from the carport re-roofing project Jeremy is doing. I was going to do it myself, but it’s hard to do carpentry projects by yourself because you need someone to hold things while you’re cutting/nailing them. Asking my dad was a good choice, because he knows what he’s doing, we work well together, and also because I really like my dad and am always looking for ways to spend time with him.
My plan for decorating it went through several iterations, before settling on tarpaper shack as the most expedient method, seeing as how we already had some tarpaper. I didn’t even know if you could paint on it, but it turns out a lot of artists actually choose tarpaper as their ground of choice. I was lucky to find paint on sale at the local Ace, and picked the bright yellow and green. The red I already had. You can see a piece of red something-or-other in the foreground. That’s the new gate, which I’ll post about in a week or so.
The peak of the roof is just high enough that I can stand in it and clear my head, so it’s maybe five and a half feet. I made most of the perches removable, for easier cleaning, and so I could adjust them if they didnt’ like the height. So far, only one of the birds likes to roost in there, the others prefer the lime tree.
