The chook pen is finished!

During January wonderful Cam had a real run at getting the chook pen finished – and we finally got there!  I was so excited that we were working on it that I kind of forgot to get more photos along the way…  But here’s Danny putting the finishing touches on the doors.

Once it was completed we had to drag it across from the shed where it was built to its final position.  Pickles thought it was a very interesting process.

In fact she was quite excited about it – leading the way!

Here it is in it’s final resting place.  If you go back to this post you will see images of our old (and very embarrassing)  chook pen.  You can see with the new one, that we have used the same large red panels to create a “front yard” for the chooks.  The pen with the red yard is for our hens.  The little one next to it is for either clunky hens that I want to use to raise some chickens, or our roosters – who are in there currently.  And the door to the left of the photo is my gardening shed, as the new chook pen location is right next to the vegie garden.

You can see in the photo above there are a couple of hens coming out the little doorway that we made for them, so that we don’t have to leave the main door open all the time.  We have put a red tank on the far end to catch any rain water that runs off the roof.  There is a gutter running along the back.  In the two shade cloth cloches at the front are a couple of kiwi fruit vines.  The yard gets very VERY hot so I’m hoping that I might be able to encourage them to wind their way up the wire to provide some shade.  I have put up some temporary wire to make a little run for the roosters, so they can get out into some sunshine.  Below you can see our arucana rooster having a crow, and the other pic, is his girlfriends next door, a couple in the nesting boxes, and some on the perch.

Its amazing how quickly they make a mess of everything though.  Those nesting boxes were bright white when they went in, and perch was new pine!  The drum to the left is up on a stand, and has a piece of PVC pipe coming from a hole in the middle at the bottom which falls into a small container.  This is our self feeder – we can keep about a months worth of feed here with out having to top up.

I love seeing other peoples chicken coops/chook pens – if you have seen a great one online please leave the web address in the comments section below, so I can check it out!