Saint Brigid’s Moneggstery
With the world losing its collective mind, the wife has decided that one thing she will never run short of is eggs. We already had a trio of the little layers, but decided to add a few more ladies to the flock. After a bit of research, I settled on a barn themed church to make our new and improved chook palace worth the time and money.
This little number features three laying boxes, a drop down access that can be locked at night, and a six-foot by eight-foot attached run. The run is a bit small for the number of chooks, and the coop a bit large, so we added a moveable chicken tractor of sorts. At eighty-square feet, that PVC and chicken-wire run is large enough to keep the ladies scratching and happy all day, then they go back into the coop in the evenings and for a final bedtime tale. We don’t have much in the way of predators out here, so the run itself isn’t terribly secure, but the coop is a fortress.
One other fun feature is the ‘steeple’ which is capped by a solar light that illuminates the side windows and gives a muted night-light to the ladies to keep them a little more comfortable at night.
Quite frankly, I’ve never considered myself much of a carpenter. A real one could build the same thing in half the time and probable save a hundred bucks on materials with a smarter design. Nevertheless, I’m pretty proud of how well this turned out. I even made sure it was short enough to fit through the garage if I ever decide to sell it. Although with all that weight, it would take a lot of bruisers to left this monster.
Now we just need to figure out how to east three dozen eggs every week. Pretty sure we can find some friends to take the excess off our hands. And if the predictions of food shortages prove more accurate that the predictions of CoronoaChan deaths, we’ll at least have a minimum of supplies on hand. We aren’t exactly preppers by any stretch, but we’re making strides towards self-sufficiency….just in case.
For those in the Protestant Section, Saint Brigid is the patron saint of chicken farmers, and together with Saint Patrick founded the first Irish monastery. Her name was a natural fit for this chicken church.