Sheltered housing

For some time now, we've been debating how best to provide some extra shelter for the chickens during the winter.   At the moment, if the weather is too breezy for their liking, they go into the cages beneath one of the two chicken coops in the run.   The smaller coop is no longer used as sleeping quarters, but the cage door is always open, so that it may be used by any of the chickens who want to wander in.  However, if it rains they all huddle together in the bigger cage.  

During last winter's snow, we found Pom-Pom standing chest-deep in snow, wondering how she got there and how she could get out.  She was still thinking about it when we found her.   After that little incident, we didn't allow them out of the cage when the snow was thick on the ground.  Part of the problem was that if we cleared the snow away from the area around the coop, one bright spark would always venture beyond the cleared area and into the deep snow.

The run is far too big for us to cover completely, and much too wide where the coop is situated.  We've toyed with all sorts of ideas to extend the cage for them, trying to find one that wouldn't cost us a fortune and would be simple to construct.   We eventually decided to put up a "smoking shelter" opposite the coop and just a dozen chicken steps away from the cage door.   If it snows, we can clear a path for them to reach the shelter.  We can also block off the rest of the run so nobody can go off-piste.

By the time we'd been able to get to the DIY store to buy what we needed, it was mid-afternoon.  Then my son got to work making the supports and a frame for the corrugated plastic roof .   As a result, it was almost dark by the time we got into the run to put it in place.   I had the vital task of holding the torch so my son could fix the screws into the wood, rather than into his fingers.  But the job got finished.

During the construction work Fizz had been slumbering on the roof of the coop.  But he got a severe case of the mutters after a while and marched down and into the coop chuntering "This noise is intolerable!".  The only real problem we had was that we had to manage without Maggie's valuable advice.  She gave up and went to bed with the rest of the mob.