Coop de Ville

I'm not really sure how it all happened. I originally agreed to having 3 chickens. Okay, I'm not really sure I ever agreed to having chickens so that may not be true. I just know that one day those 3 New Hampshire Reds showed up and became "our" chickens.
I'm not really sure when those original 3 chickens turned into 5 chickens and how those 5 chickens turned into 7 chickens. You get the idea...right? Now we have 9 chickens...it's all so confusing!
Anyway...the tenants of the little red chicken coop were outgrowing their home. We could either get rid of a few chickens or build a bigger coop. Guess what was decided...(not necessarily by me)...
Hubs decided that he should build a chicken coop that would fit the needs of the growing chicken population in our backyard.
At this point there were the original girls and now there were Rhode Island Reds and Barred Rocks and Black Sex Links.
Occasionally there are chicken casualties :(  It just happens no matter how vigilant you are as a chicken keeper. Random odd things can happen. In the grand scheme of things we have been lucky and haven't lost many. As I mentioned in another post our biggest "casualties" were hens actually becoming roosters! Even though chickens are super weird, you still feel bad if something happens to one of them.
So, in the interest of having a larger, safer, predator proof coop...Hubs got out his hammer.

Hmmm...should I have been worried? Does this seem like an exceptionally large chicken house?

Really...is this what it takes to house 9 chickens?

Its like when that hammer got in Hubs hands it just took on a life of its own...Doors and trap doors and latches and hinges and hooks and boxes and ramps...oh my!

And of course the laying boxes. 5 to be exact...just in case there were 5 hens all wanting to lay an egg at the same time? Have I mentioned how weird chickens are? Even though there are 5 large, comfy boxes they all lay their eggs in the same box! 5 perfectly good boxes and they line up and wait for their turn in the favored box. 4 unused boxes, collecting dust and feathers while the hens squawk and carry on waiting to get in the single highly sought after birthing room.

And then the embellishments began. A nice red trap door. Why? Who knows...it just looks cool. (In all fairness it has come in handy a few times...)

How about this giant heavy duty door? It does keep any cagey critters out. You can never trust a fox or a raccoon...Nothing has penetrated this fortress to date!

All chicken coops need to have snazzy red fixtures to match the snazzy red trap door and snazzy ramp tiles...don't they?

Hubs configured and added some pretty cool natural roosting branches. The chickens LOVE these branches. Sometimes there is a lot of arguing over who gets what branch.

The girls were thrilled with the new digs. They made themselves right at home. No introductory period necessary.

I could live in this thing! I actually thought about it for a minute or two before the chickens moved in. The laying box opens to the outside on the right of the picture. Because Hubs is kind of insane, he added hydraulic shocks to the lid of the laying box to make it easy to open. Really...it's a bit much...but he was just having so much fun. I think he was thinking that with this coop he could actually have an unlimited amount of chickens. Um...no. Notice the hanging hippie beads in the doorway? Those were put up as a deterrent to all the bratty sparrows in the neighborhood that fly in and eat all the chicken scratch! It worked great for the first few months. Now they just fly in at their leisure and mock us while eating bags full of chicken vittles. They bug me...

One of the Sprouts hanging out with Peace the bear and a hen. They all get along famously.
Seriously people...you need chickens. You need homegrown free-range, healthy beautiful eggs. It would change your life...Honest!