The Chicken Coop

Wow, who would have thought we’d get more comments on the Chicken Coop we’re building with our friend Amir and his brother Eldad (my nickname for him is ‘the Spanish Father’ – think about it) than on all the travels we have made so far. The Pyramids, the Acropolis, the Colossus of Rhodes, Petra – four of the seven wonders of the world …. No comments, Nada, zero, zilch ….  build a chicken coop --- dozens. Go figure!

Eldad’s wife’s family own a bunch of land just outside of TelAviv. Amir is into sustainable farming and environmental issues so he wants to build the chicken coop to raise eggs, and the Chicken guano is excellent organic fertilizer.

We worked together to come up with a plan, taking into consideration the materials they had available on-site we could reuse, then also taking into consideration the types of tools that were available – and came up with a plan we liked.

Most of the Middle East is desert so there’s not a lot of timber. There are a lot of Olive trees but they’re kind of like Arbutus – you might get one 2x4 out of an entire tree. Anyway, the cost of lumber here (as well as most everything else) is high, so we were careful to order only what we needed.

Eldad has a buddy that makes beautiful doors for residential home construction. This friend of his supplied the lumber – that turned out to be custom planed perfectly straight dimensional 2x4 (2”x4” instead of 1.5x3.5” as well as 9 ply luan plywood with mahogany veneer. This Chicken Coop is going to be De-Lux!

The fateful weekend came and Marina, Amir and Eldad excavated (moved dirt around) and put up a perimeter of concrete pavers that we’re putting the base of the Coop on. I worked on building the walls and then everyone got into the game with putting the screen on, screwing the plywood on the walls, and then raising the walls. By the Sunday Evening, we had the walls and door on, as well as most of the chicken coop features – but we needed another afternoon to screw on the roof (recycled metal roofing – what a great score that was) and to finish the interior where the chickens will be roosting.

Anyway, we got 95+% of it done by the time it came for us to leave. The rest is up to Eldad and Amir – and of course, we’re looking forward to seeing what the names of the chickens are. So far we figure: Scrambled, Omelette, Sunny, Over-easy, Eggbert, Fried, Poached, The Colonel, and Foghorn Leghorn would be good candidates.



We waited to publish this post in the hopes we would have pictures with the chickens...but apparently they are harder to get than anticipated so there is a delay. Stay tuned...as soon as they arrive we'll get a picture and post it!