All Cooped Up: Part 1

As I told my readers in an earlier post, I went through the research and decision-making processes to decide which breeds of chickens and ducks I wanted to get to start my poultry flock on our property in Piggott, Arkansas.  I even knew where I wanted to house the birds, but there was a problem.

The place needed some work…lots of work…and it needed it now.

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When we were looking the property over, the previous owner, Jeremi Wicker, showed us an old, dirt-floored building that one of the much earlier residents had set up as his workshop and tool shed.  Over the years it had developed some leaks and was in bad enough condition that Jeremi commented that he’d wanted to doze the building but just hadn’t had the time to get around to it yet.

I was glad he didn’t.  I thought it could still be saved and could work well as a poultry house.

As it turns out, it could work…with some work.

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Now, with time in short supply, I was all for the quick-fix of sheathing the building in corrugated, galvanized steel, which is commonly called tin in our area although it doesn’t actually contain any of that metal.  Anyway, I was willing to go with a corrugated steel clad building but Annie logically argued that we should cover it, as well as the old garage building (which will eventually be my studio) with the same steel that the big machine shed was constructed of.

I agreed that the property would look a lot better with the three buildings similar in construction and appearance, but pointed out that it would be more expensive to do.   Annie said we could afford it.  So, with my wife in agreement to the expense, there was no battle to be fought. 

Of course, that didn’t mean there was no dissent among the troops.

You see, I like to think things through and develop a clear plan of action for the major portions of a project, including ways to save money, before starting a new project.  When we plan the same endeavor, this frequently puts my spouse and myself at odds, as she is more of a “shoot first, ask questions later,” type.  Her approach causes me to have to “think on the move” and modify my plans on-the-fly.  It adds to my stress but, by golly, it gets things done.

The old tool shed was in rough shape, but I figured it had a year or two left before it would collapse, whereas the old garage had developed a hole in the roof that had moved the building well along the path toward becoming compost.  It was in bad enough shape that a few months could be all the time we had before it would be too far gone to save without significant expense.

My “get-it-done” wife hired a local man to put new, steel roofs on both buildings.  When she told me she had hired him I assumed he would fix the roofs before putting on the steel…but he didn’t.  He got it done quickly although I would rather the underlying structure had been repaired completely before the new metal was applied.

Anyway, it was done.

Before the re-roofing, Annie had hired our electrician friend to rewire both buildings.  He replaced the ancient fuse box and fiber insulation wiring with a modern breaker box and new wiring.  The working lights and outlets will come in handy as the remodel progresses.

Now it was my turn to join the “chicken house needs to get done now,” rush.

I heard on the news that a bird flu epidemic was making its way around the country and wiping out whole flocks of poultry.  One report said that, due to the disease, hatcheries were so overrun with orders that they just couldn’t keep up with the demand.  This was borne out to me when I checked into pre-ordering my poultry so that they would arrive on my schedule.  Murray McMurray had no straight-run (both male and female) Buff Orpington chicks available until next fall!  While that would give me ample time to get the hen house completed, it would put us into next year before my hens would start laying eggs.

Sure, I can wait that long, but really don’t want to.  Besides, I want to have them housed and ready to grow when the grandkids arrive for their annual group summer visit in a couple weeks.

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As you may remember, I have also been working on getting the cabin at Sweetwater plumbed with running water from our spring.  In need of a fitting I stopped by Orscheln Farm and Home store in Poplar Bluff, Missouri after work one day and found just what I needed…and more.

After I found the fitting I yielded to an urge to check if the store had the baby chicks, ducks, and rabbits that they normally do at that time of year.  They did.  Among the cages of different breeds were a couple that held…Buff Orpingtons.

The coop wasn’t prepared for the chicks but I knew I could get it ready quickly if the planets aligned to allow me the time, and the steel arrived soon.  Still, it would be better if I waited a while before actually buying chicks.

It occurred to me that due to the bird flu the chicks Orscheln had could sell out and they might not be able to get any more when I was actually ready.  I flagged down a friendly employee named Jeremiah who told me he had heard about the flu but didn’t know for sure if the store would be able to get more birds, although he thought they probably would.

Hmmm.  Encouraging but not definite enough for my planning.  I debated with myself long enough to decide that I should buy some chicks while I was certain to get them.  A bird in the hand, as they say.

I asked Jeremiah to put fifteen of the cute little chicks in transport boxes so that I could get them home safe and warm.  Then I picked up a bag of chick starter feed, a feeder, a waterer, and a heat lamp.  I knew we already had most of that but since the move I hadn’t seen them and wasn’t sure where they were.

Better to have them and not need them than to need them and not have them.

In a flash of good forethought I had bought a little two-story cage a few weeks earlier.  After assembly, with a little straw in the bottom and surrounded by cardboard wall, it would serve very well as a brooder cage for the little chicks and would house them for a week or so to give me time to get the tool shed/coop renovated.

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In the weeks leading up to this point I had been using spare moments to remove the crumbling siding from the old tool shed.  Annie had thought I was wasting time that could have been spent fixing the building up.

Believe it or not it turns out I was right.

The antique and coggled-together tools that remained attached to the work bench were surprisingly easy to take off.  Anyone who has tried to remove rusted-together nuts and bolts can understand my relief.  I stored them in the old garage until I decide what to do with them.

Next, all the old shelves, the workbench, and various old brackets and hangers were pulled off and burned, thrown in the trash, or set aside for re-purposing.

The old building had most recently (probably a couple decades ago) been sided with fiber board, which had rotted in the sun and rain until it came to pieces as I pulled it off.  The fiber board had been nailed on over the original siding, which was tongue-and-groove pine and had been slowly dry-rotting for many years.  The roof leaks then came along and added wet-rot to the equation.  Tearing off the layers of siding allowed access to the pair of aluminum-framed storm windows that had served to admit sunlight into the building over the work bench.  With the siding off, I used my flat crowbar and claw hammer to pull out the old nails holding them.  Then the whole windows, frame and all, were easily taken off and moved to the old garage to protect them from getting broken until I was ready to put them back in.

Now I was faced with the enormity of my undertaking.  Over the years and various leaks in the roof, the siding hadn’t been the only things that had rotted.  More than two thirds of the studs in the walls had rotted to the point that they absolutely had to be replaced.  Honestly, if the wiring and roof hadn’t already been replaced Jeremi’s idea of dozing the place and building from the ground up would have been the best plan of action.  After the expenditure of cash for getting the wiring and roof done I didn’t want to destroy the just-paid-for work and have to turn around and do it all over again.

When I say the studs were rotted I’m not exaggerating.  One of the true-dimension, sawmill-cut 2x4s in the back wall had rotted completely away for a two-foot length and the rest of it didn’t have much good wood left either.  Many of the other studs were rotted about halfway through.  The fact that the old building still had its original dimensions was incredible but bears out my belief that old time construction techniques were solid and nothing to be taken lightly.

In fact, my enthusiasm for preserving history was reinforced when I saw the shed’s old sills. Today the sills would be made of pine 2x8s for a shed that size, heavily treated with preservative.  The original sills, though seriously rotted in one corner, were made of true-dimension, untreated 4x6s.  They look to have been cut from old cedar trees somewhere around a hundred years ago, about when this part of the country was carved out of the swampy wilderness.

Like I said, a couple of the ends were badly rotted, but the log-cabin type lap construction on the remaining sills made me want to keep them.  By using cripple-nailing and a bit of bracket-coggling of my own, I was able to keep the old sills and still make my new coop as square and strong as if I actually had dozed it and built from scratch.

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I was feeling proud of myself for the progress I’d made with removing most of the ancient siding and starting to replace rotted studs.  It was beginning to look like I’d be done in just a short time.

Then the storm hit.

Our property, sitting out in the middle of broad, open, flat farmland, is windy in normal weather, but when a storm passes through it seems to concentrate on us.  The storm I’m talking about was a bad one and, yes, it concentrated on us. 

I got home from work that day to find wood scraps sprinkled around the yard north of the old tool shed, and the shed itself leaning precariously close to total collapse.

When I saw my squared-up shed looking more like a parallelogram from my nightmares my first thought was, “Well, shoot.”

Or something like that.

What was I going to do?  Check out my next post to find out.

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