There has been major progress in the coop. All the walls are in place.

I actually built the two interior partition walls on the last day before Christmas holidays (when I finished the floor). Then, when I returned to construction in January, I put up the cladding and built the rest of the walls.

Of course, there’s more to the story. Let me back up a bit. As always, I have details.

Reminder, the coop is going to have three pens. Each partition sits on the new floor I built and lines up with posts I put in. (This post shows the plans for the coop.)

The interior walls between the pens were easy. Studs 16 inches on centre. Wood cladding on the bottom half (including some fancy tongue and groove salvaged from the old coop). Mesh on the top.

At one end, I decided I could use the exterior wall of the barn as the wall for the coop. At the other end, I needed to build a new wall to achieve my room-within-a-room plan. This wall gave me a bit of trouble.

Like the other walls, I built it flat on the floor and then lifted it into place. Given that this wall was going to be against part of the stone of the barn, I thought it would be helpful to put the cladding on before it was installed. I stapled my mesh, then I decided to use a piece of metal roofing from the old coop to cover the other half.

As I lifted it onto the platform, I realized I’d missed a crucial step. I forgot to square up the wall before putting on my cladding. When I tried to slide the wall into place, sure enough, it didn’t go. The wall was a parallelogram. The opening was a rectangle.

I took off all the cladding then Matt’s Dad (who came to help me out) and I lifted it out, laid it back down on the floor and tried to square it up. We couldn’t line it up, so we put it back in the opening, where it straightened itself out perfectly. Only problem, the cladding wasn’t attached, and I had very limited space up against the stone of the barn. After borrowing my Dad’s right angle drill and testing my limits in stretching and contortion, I managed to get the metal back on.

The front walls of the coop were much more straightforward. I had been holding off building these ones, as I wanted to have my doors so I knew what size openings to build. I had a plan to use old screen doors, but it turned out secondhand screen doors are very expensive. Once I accepted that I was going to be building doors, I realized I could make the openings any size I wanted.

The first wall I built was the middle one because I was able to find one door. This is a very special door because my Dad built it for my childhood coop. The coop is now a storage shed in my Mom’s backyard, and she, knowing I was looking for doors, suggested I could take the one off the old coop.

I love having a door from our family’s coop built by my Dad as part of our coop. My Dad set me on this path of birds when I was younger than Ellie. I remember him building the coop in my grandfather’s garage. Now I’m building our own coop and continuing something that he really enjoyed.

Like the partition walls, the front wall has wood cladding on the bottom and mesh on the top, then the doorway is centred.

The last two front walls, Matt’s Dad and I knocked out in one very productive day. I built these doorways a bit taller to accommodate the doors that I planned to make.

Having the walls in place is another major milestone. It actually looks like a coop!

As I mentioned in my last update, I’ve been documenting the coop construction on video and sharing on Instagram. If you want to see more about the coop, follow me at juliaon129acres, and catch up on all the videos in the coop highlights (part 1 and part 2).