May 28th - Building a chicken run so they can run

Hooray, it's the long weekend finally!  No rest for us though, we've got a run to build.  My husband is SO WONDERFUL!  He's engineered it so that we're creating 11 panels that will screw together.  That way, if one panel gets damaged we can remove it and put new wire in without dismantling the entire yard.  While Bob cut and assembled the frames, I painted on the first coat of white.  I'll do the second coat when they are all assembled together.

We built 3 smaller frames to go under the chicken coop and used 1/2" hardware cloth.  Before putting those on, we added several inches of "washed sand" under the coop and sprinkled DE onto that.  Hopefully, since it will be shady under there and a place to get out of the rain, this is where they'll choose to take "dust baths".  Next we added more hardware cloth UNDER the frames, added larger rocks AND then 3/4" crush run on top so it looked more finished.

Starting to look pretty good for a chicken coop! After 3 LONG days of working on this, we were both so tired we just couldn't bring ourselves to assemble it all.

Now I know why farmers go to bed so early!  They're wiped out from all the hard work!