(Bill) An Eggcellent Project

With the boys off for an entire month for their Christmas break (!), we desperately needed a project to focus our time.  Thus, we began a modest venture to construct a chicken coop. 

We found a plan online, rounded up the only tools that we would need: a borrowed circular saw, tape measure and hammers.  It goes without saying that I would have LOVED to have use of my shop for the chop saw, table saw, speed square, level, drills, chisels, block plane, etc.   We then set out to round up the building materials. 

To buy lumber here, you don’t drive to the nearest Home Depot of Dunn Lumber.  No, you venture into the labyrinth of Ndirande market and I have to laugh now at how crazy this was.  Blessings accompanied us for our first trip for our framing lumber.  Of course, with Micah, Liam, and me, we were an instant spectacle and  were instantly surrounded by people hoping to help.

We were paraded through the various stalls to find the required pieces.  It was a whole other world with people repurposing and selling everything and anything you could imagine.  Liam was nervous and a bit overwhelmed, but remained brave.  Micah bounced around oblivious to the craziness and drew smiles and head pats.  I stuck my chest out a bit and tried to walk with as much confidence as I could muster.     

Some of the pieces had to be ripped down, so we took more of a tour to cross a stream over the sketchiest bridge to get to the mill.  At the mill, men were busy sending pieces through homemade table saws and when he ripped my piece in half, no tape measure used.  Close enough is close enough! 

The highlight was getting busy with the boys measuring, cutting, nailing.  We improvised a cereal box to be our speed square and get square cut lines.  There was not a single piece of lumber (seriously) that was straight or of uniform dimension, so we did our best and kept repeating the mantra:  It’s just a chicken coop!   

We ended up going to Ndirande market two other times and just TODAY, we mounted the door latch and we’re done.  We constructed the coop to accommodate 8 birds, so tomorrow morning we head out to get our 8 “layers”, hens that are 22 weeks old and ready to produce eggs.  We’ll tell you how that goes!