Operation Chicken Fort: Getting closer

Another weekend. Another big push to complete the chicken coop. Cliff, Marc, and Josh made some excellent progress on both Saturday and Sunday. Hannah was out at 4-H and Charlotte was napping on Saturday afternoon so I managed to pop down to assist with the efforts.

The walls are up already.

At this point, the entire main room had walls with plywood already attached. They had even cut out a doorway. Josh and Cliff were inside building the roof trusses, so Marc and I set about building the walls for the side room, which was roughly 4' x 8'.


We started with the long wall. It was just over 8' in length and we would be raising it to a height of 7' (plus the thickness of the header and footer). We cut our top and bottom and then marked the locations of the studs. After that we cut all our studs to the same length and made a makeshift work table on the ground.

As we suspected the walls were not 8', the studs were not cut
to account for the top and bottom. I mean, we designed it this way!

It was not perfectly level so we used a flat brick under each joint to bring things nice and flush. We squared and levelled everything and it worked out quite well.

Once we got the outer wall out, we discussed whether we needed three or four walls. Given that the fourth wall could be covered by the outer wall of the existing room, we settled on three. We started making our two smaller walls on the actual platform.

The outside facing the backyard and our doorway, sans door.

The first one was simple, but the second one required some thought as it would have a door. Marc and Cliff are both over 6' so we made the door 6'6" and 30" wide. We used some scrap wood for the header. Once that was done we raised it up and secured it all into place.

That was the end of my contribution for the weekend, but on Sunday the guys were able to get the trusses finished and attach more than half of them to the roof. This week they should be able to get the rest up and board the outer room. Hopefully by next weekend we will have roofing on and can start on the fencing.

Stay tuned!