*makeshift chicken tractor

So, the first little chicks that we started with are now fully feathered and can easily keep their own body heat.  We have 10 young pullets who are now living in their own fine little (makeshift) chicken tractor.   Henry and I put our two heads together this week along with our working hands and came up with this:

Recycle!

Isn't she beautiful?

Remember her.. my favorite of the Rhode Island Reds.. she has almost lost all of her beautiful yellow on her head. She is still a beauty to me though. Her name is Jazzy.

We made this using what we had around the house already. The pantry had doors on each cabinet when we moved in, but I decided to remove them and have an country style open cupboards in that space. This left us with MANY cabinets with hardware still attached. The 'doors' are easy to lift for removing chicks, replacing water supply or feeding the flock.  I think they love their new space. 

Ok. So we are not going to win any awards for design but our chickens seem quite happy to call this home, so stop judging.

We did not use a specific plan when we set out to build the chicks new home.  We did however, go to Google, and put in a search for images of chicken tractors.  You see I am one of those crazy fly by the seat of my pants kind of gal. That can be a positive and it can also be a negative... We did not build the walk up to the nesting boxes, cause we didn't build nesting boxes.  We are hoping that our "real" chicken coop will be built by the real carpenter in our family when he is here again.

While we were building this Henry stepped back and looked at it and said, "If dad was building this it wouldn't look anything like this, AT ALL." He then noted how his dad would have measure precisely each piece, cut all the pieces first, had them accounted for and THEN assembled it all carefully.  He is right. Eric is amazing with his building skills. The chickens will probably all stand amazed when Eric finally gets their real coop built.