Putting lipstick on a pig (or slow progress on the chicken coop)

This weekend I’ll make progress building the coop. That is my hope. That was my hope last weekend, and the soil-cement slab still sits there unimproved since I put it in. But this weekend will be different.

I did pick up a door for the coop last weekend. I found a listing for free doors/windows in the northern part of the state. Izzy and I drove there and, sliding around on the ice, loaded a door into the back of the mini-van. It is a metal clad exterior door, but in pretty rough shape; not really worth the hour drive to get it. The bottom of the door was completely rotted away, and, deciding that it doesn’t really matter how tall the door is to the chicken coop (I can duck my head, and the chickens certainly won’t care), I cut off the bottom 3- 4 inches of the door.

The (hopefully) soon to be chicken coop door before painting.

The paint was in pretty bad shape, so I pulled off the plastic trim decoration and decided to use some fairing compound to fill the holes and then paint the door with some left-over marine topside paint that I was going to throw away. I didn’t spend a lot of effort making it look great, but it does look better than it did when I picked it up. And no one will ever notice it once it is installed.

The door after priming and painting. Hopefully I have enough paint left over to finish the other side. Better to use the paint than throw it away. I’ll probably flip the door around so it opens outwards, so at least the chickens will have a nice baby blue door to enjoy from the inside.

Now I need to go and get Ben up so he can help me pull out lumber to start building the coop. Plus I can’t forget to make the brooding box – I did pull out the plywood scrap for the bottom, but promptly got distracted with other projects. We pick up the first batch of chicks on Friday and I’ll need a place to put them when I get home.

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