Building the Chook Pen - Part I

I had hoped to be hearing the cheep cheeps of little chicks this Easter. Alas, it is not to be and I concede that we will not be making our first deadline from the 2012 Task List. We'd planned to have our long-awaited chook pen finished by the end of March, but OE has run into some health hassles and we've fallen behind schedule. At least we've had some pretty productive working bees with our neighbours over the past couple of months, and here's where we are to date.

This is what we started with at the beginning of the year - a cleared flat piece of earth....

We started by putting in the corner and centre posts...

Next came the purlins, then the bearers and joints for the floor of the chook house. We also dug a 30 cm tunnel around the entire exterior where we'll place some wire to fox-proof the pen.

The bones are there, but still a few more weekends of work to put up the wire mesh and build the hen house.