The Chicks Have Moved

The chickens have moved into their permanent home! We finally, after 4 weeks finished the chicken house and run. My father-in-law designed the house and my husband designed the run. I think they both did a GREAT job. Thank you to everyone who helped with this project. We also had a good friend of ours who spent a couple of his weekends here to help us complete it (thanks Jason).I have to admit this chicken house was WAY over budget. I am sure there are tons of ways we could have cut corners and saved more money. I am happy however with how everything turned out and I know this will last us a very long time. All my engineers thought of every possible situation and prepared the house and run for it (rain, wind, cold, hot).

I am very excited to have them outside and in their new home. I think they are enjoying it too. They have so much more room. They ventured outside for the first time yesterday and loved pecking around and eating grass. It was so much fun to watch.We had a bit of a scare though when we got home from my oldest sons track meet Tuesday night. When we pulled in the driveway we could see that the chickens had escaped and were in the backyard! We quickly counted them and realized there was only 8. We chased them around and finally caught all of them and when I went back to the run I saw that the 9th bird was stuck in the fence. She was chirping loudly and I could see her back feathers were bloody. I got her loose and put her in the chicken house and she has seemed to recover ok.

Needless to say I need to reinforce the bottom of the run with chicken wire. I had no idea they could just slip right through the opening. Once they gain a little more weight they shouldn't be able to escape...hopefully!