Chicken Coop Progress, Week 2

Sunshine helped install the last of the joists

Last week I worked on the coop four days, but only two of those days were actually spent building part of the coop. The other two days were occupied with trips to Lowe's for wood and the Habitat store for doors and windows. I'm still counting them as exercise days since loading and unloading heavy wood, windows, and doors is definitely a workout. I also spent time on the treadmill twice and paddled a tandem kayak 6.2 miles. I got a decent amount of exercise last week :)

this is what it looked like when I started working on it last week

The first day I worked on the coop I installed the rest of the joists, then laid down the plywood floor. At this point I discovered that despite my best efforts, my frame was not as square as I thought. Or my plywood was very uneven. Or a bit of both. Mostly likely the last option. I also forgot to account for the width of the long boards in the frame, which means the floor is actually a little wider than 8 feet. Between not being quite square and a bit larger than I had planned for, my floor was not shaping up how I wanted. In addition, the whole thing weighed too much for me to do much shifting, and I couldn't remove all the joists and cut them down two inches. So it stayed as it was, much to my frustration.

you can see the gap on the left

The next time I worked on the coop I cut narrow strips out of scrap plywood to fill in the gaps on the edge of the frame. It's a bit patchwork-looking, but most of it will be covered by the framework of the wall, so I wasn't too concerned about looks, more about filling in the gaps.

After I patched the flooring, I built the framework for the south wall. Framing out the windows added to the time it took, but even so, framing the wall only took about an hour. At that point I ran out of time and left the framework on the floor. The windows went back into the shed for safekeeping.

deciding on window placement

checking the finished wall, with windows propped in the window frames

At that point, I was fairly pleased with how it was turning out. However, I miscalculated something. Does anyone else see my mistake? I had fun fixing that today. I'll tell you more next week.