Chickens in the basement are rarely a good idea, but….

Sometimes, necessary.

Back in February, before moving to the ranch, I found out our local country store would be selling many different breeds of poultry and I would need to reserve what I wanted then and there or miss out.

I told the ranch manager, aka my husband, that I would be ordering chicks and that we would need a coop about 8 weeks after they arrived…at the time this seemed like a good solid plan.  We could keep the chicken in the basement and then move them out.  But life and projects have a way of destroying well laid plans and such was the case with this one.

We had one blizzard after another and before I knew it, the chickens were still in the basement and it was smelling pretty darn bad!  Now to be fair to hubby, he did warn me that chickens in the house were NOT a good idea, but I plowed ahead anyway as I wanted eggs this year.

I started out with this nice neat box and 16 chicks: 6 Araucanas, 6 Delawares and my 2 impulse buys while waiting in line to checkout at the country store, a Buff Orpington and a Blue Wyandotte. 





Here we are weeks and weeks later and the same cute chicks have outgrown their box and now the horse trough.

The Reds in their upgraded box.

A coop was needed and fast.  The smell and the dust and the mess from these girls was getting out of hand.  They wouldn’t stay in the brooders. I would come down in the morning and they would be EVERYWHERE and there was Poop EVERYWHERE.  Who knew chickens could be sooo messy and smell sooo bad? (Hubby would say he told me so 🙂 )  My new country friends found this all quite humorous and probably a bit horrifying that our basement had become a chicken coop.

But we were starting out from scratch to build a new life on our ranch and chickens in the basement for a while where just part of the adventure.

Next…building the Coop!