Suck It Pinterest...My Egg Storage is WAY Cuter Than All the Ideas on Pinterest

AND I made it for free.
The only "new" bits are the screws and they will get reused on the next project.  I had run out of decent used screws with normal head (too many hex heads, square heads, various sizes...couldn't keep up with bits).  So, I bought a cheapo box of philips head wood screws about 1 1/2 inches long.  Made the door with them.

I had been storing my eggs in an old egg carton or two.  Red rubber band on the one that is "ready to go" and a blue rubber band on the carton that is "building up".  It didn't work well because I don't have anywhere to set egg cartons.  So they were in a grocery basket hanging off my loft ladder.  But that basket ALSO had to hold groceries like fruit and veg, often heavy.  Annoying.  And the cartons wear out.

I saw one of these on a youtube and wanted to make it:



But, that was hard and I can't be bothered.  So, I thought about what I had on hand that I could use.

When I found a batch of eggs while doing another project with friends, I had an old mini muffin tin sitting around outside. It had been part of a bee feeder I'd cobbled up, and was then part of the apparatus keeping chickens out from under the shed.  I turned it up and put the eggs in it for temporary storage...it worked great and looked cute.

So, I took the muffin tin in (tested the eggs...all were plenty fresh enough to eat so I boiled them up and brought them to work for lunches that week) and sure enough, it fit pretty well between 2 studs in the shed (heh heh...studs).  I found an old plant stake, a 1x2, and cut it to length.  While doing all this, I found another mini muffin tin, same width.

In total I have 21 muffin-egg holder holes.  One tin is 9 muffins and one is 12.  They are old and I got them at thrift at least 4 years ago.  I usually won't spend over a dollar for a baking item so that is probably the original price to me.

The plant stake, I have no idea.  I got a big bundle years ago and use and reuse them until they get too weak to pound in the ground, then they are scrap lumber for propping things closed or propping up chicken wire fencing that is starting to bulge.  Maybe it cost a dollar originally.

Box of 250 screws was about 8$. I used 8.  You can do that math if you want.

The impact driver was free from Fred's stash of tools. 
The bits...I got a box of 10 for 12$ (nice magnetic ones) or so and have been using this one for about a month!  Must be better metal than the ones I used to buy because I'd strip those out quite a bit faster.

I guess it is a 3$ egg holder but I think we need to amortize that over the previous lives of the items involved and the future lives of some of them like the screws and the bit which will no doubt be reused.

It is pretty cute though.  Here's the big reveal.








































Sher said I should get out more...she is mean to me.

If You Build It, They Will Come

God I hate that movie!  

But, that crappy line is apparently true.

Coop 3.0 was barely settling in with the 3 red hens (ha!) when I got a call from the friend who gave me 2 of the red ones, Brittany and Suzanne (the chickens, not the friend, the friend is Cindy and human), had 11 hens given to her because the owner felt that the hens "bicker too much."...Uh...they are chickens.  Chickens are persnickety assholes.   Like most of the women in my family (sorry, but you know it's true).   Cindy has a full flock of heavy layers who don't eat much and these 11 weren't worth integrating to the big group, apparently.

Anyway, she called to see if I wanted more.  Given the size of Coop 3.0 and my unwillingness to build Coop 4.0 so soon, I said "no more than 3."
Cindy picked the 3 specialty breed hens and brought them over.

Here are the chickens. 

The reddish ones I've had for few weeks.  Others are new and very different.

Porky and Pearl

Porky is a Barred Rock (the black and white one).  She's big boned...actually, she's a fat ass.  Pearl is a Leghorn and quite shiny with an oddly large bosom just like Foghorn Leghorn in the cartoons.

Brittany and Suzanne with Porky and Pearl.

Brittany and Suzanne are "Novogen" breed.  A cross between Rhode Island reds and Leghorns.  They are super tame and lay HUGE brown eggs.  Porky, I think, also lays brown eggs.  Pearl is the only one laying white.  

Brittany is a scrawny red-neck runaway.  Suzanne is a follower who wants you to think she's tough, but she's not.

T-Bone giving the camera the stank eye, and Prudence looking put out behind her.

T-Bone came from the community garden in Worley.  All the rest are from my friend Cindy who is the bomb.  T-Bone was a runner who spent her days escaping the chicken run and digging up the garden.  I don't have a chicken run so she saves that escape time and spends it in the garden...digging shit up.  T-Bone is tough.  10 minutes after I let her out of the transport cage on my property, she had a mouthful of Brittany's feathers.   10 minutes after the 3 new chickens (Porky, Pearl and Prudence) arrived, she had a mouthful of Pru's feathers.  Suzanne just follows T-Bone around all day and gets panicky if she loses sight of T-Bone...basically Suzanne is T-Bone's bitch.

Prudence (Pru) is an Ameraucana big, and prissy (hence "Prudence").  

Pru lays BIG pale blue eggs that are a bit on the green side.

They were laying in the laying boxes, but today, no one could be bothered, apparently.  So I got one egg from the floor and covered in poo!  Jerks.  Tomorrow they will have to stay in the coop until there are eggs...at least 5 (they don't all lay every day...I think 5 eggs per week per bird is pretty good).  They will have plenty of food and water.  And it's a big coop and there is a giant storm tomorrow so I'm sure they will all be in there most of the day anyway.  When it rains they either sit under a table I have outside or go back in the coop.

UPDATE:  I actually wrote this last week.  The hens lay more in the coop now, but not entirely.  We may need more prison days (not full days...) to encourage them to lay in the coop.  Today (for real today) Pru spent HOURS just sitting in a nesting box not laying an egg.  What the hell?  The original 3 were busy sitting under the table I got out of a dumpster a few years ago:

Coop 3.0: Another Adventure in Crapentry

So, I've got those new hens...Brittany, Suzanne and T-Bone.
They are hilarious and do weird sh*t all day when I'm home...and probably when I'm not home.

They had been in a really crap coop that forced them to sit in...well, crap.
SO, I decided to remodel and upgrade and reuse bits of the old one, some really excellent pallets I'd found, and some bits-n-bobs from elsewhere.

Design upgrades:
1) Bigger. It needed to be bigger.  The old one, coop 2.0, had room for 3 hens, but NOT for me to access it easily for clean out.  And 1 more hen or a rooster would put it over capacity.

2)  Easier access.  The old one I had to crawl around and reach in through the door for the chickens.  Awkward and meant chicken sh*t on the knees of my work pants.   Not all that much fun.  Really hard to rake the poo out or get the eggs.  But, it had been empty since Eula Goodnight finally croaked...the last hen from last year's misfit chicken ranch.With the new more active chickens, it wasn't great.


SO...I mentally designed and redesigned for about a month.
Then, I grabbed the bull by the pallets, and gave it a shot.

I had a 6 foot long, nearly 4 wide pallet with almost solid decking!  One missing board.
This ended up being the north wall.  I moved the decking boards around to make the one missing board area at the right height for the laying boxes.  Managed to carefully pry a board off, move it down a bit, and screw it back on.  Worked great.

I pounded a couple of t-posts in the ground and put that nice pallet up on them.
Then I added the east and west walls...regular size pallets I had around the property.  Each is anchored on a t-post, and screwed into the north wall.

For nest boxes, I took some 3 gallon plastic buckets, 2 actually, and screwed them, bottom to the north, open end to the south, onto the north wall pallet.  With my reciprocating saw I cut out most of the back side of the buckets.  These are lined up with the gap in the north wall pallet.

I used an old 2x2 to run horizontally across the bottom of the south, open, end of the bucket next boxes so the straw I put in there, and any eggs the ladies leave me, won't roll out.  Cut to length with the trusty reciprocating saw and screwed it on (I like screws because you can take them out and redo things as you change your mind).  It goes fully east to west and the boxes only take up half the east-west distance in the coop so there is about 3' of it the hens can roost on.

A few serviceberry branches that had come off bushes in the winter were added at odd angles here and there inside for more roosting.

I used my reciprocating saw to cut the north end of the east/west walls down to the level of the north wall, leaving the south sides a few inches taller. 
Onto this I hoisted (at great risk to my back...) an 8 foot long pallet I found behind bicycle shop about a year ago. It slopes down toward the north wall and was a bit "short" north to south, but that sorted itself out with the roofing...more anon.

The south wall was just open at this point.  I wanted to be able to access the entire inside through that wall if need be, AND I wanted the floor to be the bottom part of a car-top carrier that I found at the recycling center a year ago (it had been the roof of Coop 2.0)  The 6 foot long pallet, minus the widths of the east/west pallet walls was just about 8" longer than the car-top carrier, and the width was close enough to the width of the east/west wall pallets.  I made sure the east wall of the coop was moved in to match that which gives the hens a small sheltered area just outside their door, which is cut into the east pallet-wall (with the reciprocating saw...of course).

SO...I took a board off my wonky wood rack for the pick up (needed upgrading badly anyway) and screwed it along the top part of the east west wall pallets.  Another board from the wonky wood rack was screwed on at a level that would allow the car-top carrier to be a removable floor and slide out, poo and straw and all, under the main wall.  Like a trundle bed of chicken poo!  I put  few mini pallets (from my sawdust logs I buy for the wood stove) under the car-top carrier for better slidage.  Triple checked the height of the lower south wall horizontal board and added more screws and a few support boards.

I had made some crap panels of cedar boards salvaged off a discarded fence gate I found in an alley last year down in Moscow.  They were about the right height to make a passable south wall for the coop!  I trimmed the 3 panels down to the right height...actually, they are about 1/4" too tall but I will sort that out one of these days.

To make the south wall an access for getting into the coop for cleaning, I used cedar fence slats I got free off of craigslist to make the horizontal south wall boards into little slots for the panels to slide in.  Once I get the panels trimmed up, I will be able to slide them out the east and west ends and rake out any nonsense the hens put in there.

Finally, I used a few of the cedar fence slats to make runners for some scrap boards behind the nest boxes in that missing-board area of the north wall pallet!  I just slide the board to the west and grab the eggs without having to get in the coop.

Then it was on to the roof.  My builders for my future imaginary house let me have 3 pieces of salvaged metal roofing.  They just fit the roof.  One is a bit long and makes an overhang on the south side which will eventually use to accidentally poke my own eye out.

Finally finally I used the rest of the cedar fence slats to side between the slats of the pallet on the west wall and east wall, and to make a chicken ladder for the door (which the hens didn't care about)  The ladder gets picked up at night and jammed into the pallet gap to close the hens inside.

I contacted the cedar slat guy and he had some more.  I got those a few days later and they are laying in the hen-yard waiting to finish up covering some gaps in the siding if I get to it.

Over all, I really like how the coop works.
The slider thingy for egg access gets a bit snug when it rains, but it was free and easier to deal with than lining up hinges.
Sliding the poo-tray out works well.

I had to trap the hens in the coop with food and water for a couple of days until they laid their eggs in there (once the eggs appeared they were cut loose) just to get them in the habit. 
There are 4 eggs in this picture because I'm leaving 1 egg in the laying box as bait...it's marked so I don't eat it.  It's getting OLD...

They had been just pooping eggs out whereever they happened to be and they roam over about 15 acres.  Now 2 of them (T-Bone and I think Suzanne) consistently lay in one of the buckets.



The hens didn't care for the ladder and tore the little steps off it so now it's just the door.
And, the south wall panels need trimming so they slide better.  The hens seem happy enough in it.  It's somewhere they can relax and take a break when they are sick of digging up my gardens.