Posted in Animals

Yesterday I ordered my hens. Six 18 week old Brown Shavers are arriving here at the beginning of August. The demand for hens is so great at the moment that August is the first I can get them, but that's ok with me, because it's probably going to take me that long to get prepared for them.

I had this great (crazy) idea that we could build our own hen house. We had looked at henhouses down the road and they are terrifically expensive - in the thousands of dollars which seems ridiculous to me. We looked at buying an old shed from trademe (our equivalent of ebay), but getting it here seemed to be a problem, so I looked up henhouse plans on the internet and found a solution. We'd build our own as a homeschooling project. My 8 year old son is desperate for woodworking classes, but he's not old enough yet to go to the homeschooling group class (another year to wait), and so I thought, 'is there any reason why we can't build our own?' No, I don't think so.

So I downloaded the plans for $5, printed them out, and yesterday me and the kids went down to our local buiding supply store. A young man there helped us out, loaded up the trailer, charged us for the wood (gulp, gulp - not as cheap as I would have liked), and we crawled home. I'd had to let the back of the trailer down to fit the large sheet of plywood (that's going to be the floor) into the trailer, and I was worried all those bits of wood might go sliding out the back as we drove home, because I didn't have anything to secure it with.

We got home ok, and when I got out and looked at the supplies, then looked at the plans, then looked at our location for the hen house, I had this sudden feeling of doubt, and being overwhelmed. Can I really do this??? I didn't even know what type of nails to buy for it - I think the young man at the store was very kind - he only smiled a little bit.

I reminded myself to take it one step at a time - just do the next thing. I'm looking forward to getting started, I just hope it won't be one big disaster - although the hens probably aren't fussy. The young man at the store told me he thought it looked fairly straight forward - I hope he's right!

If anyone's interested, I got the plans from: www.buildeazy.com