This is for the Birds!

Literally. I’m not kidding. Not even a little bit.

What am I not kidding about?

Well, my daughter and I have been tossing an idea around for about a year now, and a few weeks ago, we finally took the plunge …. and bought five of the most adorable little Black Star chickens. The more common name for them is Black Sex Link chickens, but CJ refuses to say that name. So, to prevent my son from turning beat red every time we mention the breed, I’ve chosen to refer to them by their less common name.

Technically, the reason that tipped the scales in favor of doing this is because we go through four or five dozen eggs a month in my house. You wouldn’t think three and a half people (counting my granddaughter as half when it comes to food consumption) could eat that many eggs, but somehow, we manage to. Every. Single. Month.

So, I started to worry a little bit. Like … what are the chickens producing all of these eggs being fed? And medicated with? Then I thought … I’ll just start buying organic eggs. But the penny-pincher in me cringed at the thought of paying $4-$5.00 a dozen for them.

Then my daughter said, “Let’s just raise our own chickens.”

And it kind of made sense, and we bought the baby chicks. Who started getting bigger at an alarmingly fast rate. I thought we’d have more time to get a chicken coop, but … it’s seriously unbelievable how big those things are after a few weeks! So, we started looking at coops, and my inner cheapskate said nope. It’ll take two years to see any savings over buying organic eggs. We’ll just build the coop ourselves.

I figured I’d watched my dad remodel a couple of houses, and watched This Old House and Home Improvement. How hard could it be? A little harder than I thought. A pattern might have helped. And maybe an exact list of the materials we would need.  But you know what?

It’s so much fun trying to get this thing built!

The main part looks kind of like a tool bench at this point, but we’re almost finished with the nesting box and it, along with the roof, front, and end walls should all be finished by tonight. By Tuesday, the run and painting should be finished, and those chickens can be rehomed from the dog kennel to their coop.

Oops. Did I mention we’ll be making and installing a swing to two as well? No joke. We will.

One of the best things about this chicken coop experience is that I now have some real life ‘building’ experience, which will come in handy for one of the books in the news series.

And speaking of, this is one of the songs on today’s playlist. I love this song so much, but had never seen this video. I was almost sobbing by the end of it. The lyrics resonated with me the first time I heard it, but seeing this video…  The only thing I can say is wow. Somehow, I have to work something like this into a book.

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