lofty living

All conventional chicken wisdom suggests that the coop be ready for the chickens before they arrive home. Even though they'll be living in the basement in their brooder for the next two months at least, it seems it's best to avoid the experience of having full grown chickens squawking around the house without a place to call their own. So, we decided to troll our local craigslist to see what our options were.

Once we weeded through the regular batch of craigslist crazies, we fell upon Jon and Cindy Bake of Bake's Binsters. Jon is a pro contractor who is taking a gamble on the fact that the urban chicken market is going to continue to grow pretty furiously in Portland by designing a series of modular coop/compost bins. I told him exactly what we wanted and he built the coop in two days to our specifications.



That window you see is the window that looks out over my kitchen sink. The screened part under the window is what's called the run, and the solid wood part to the right is the house where the chickens can roost (sit up in the air on bars) at night. There's a guillotine door on the far right side, where we intend to build a coop expansion out into the neighboring bed this spring, once we've removed all that blasted bamboo. Sustainable material, maybe, but also a huge pain in the tush. If anyone wants me to send it to them to make some sheets out of or something, let me know.



We're pretty thrilled with the way the coop looks. Since you can see it from the street, we didn't want it to be an eyesore and we think Jon did a great job. It's kind of like a condo in the Pearl District, really. Our ladies will live in style.