I love Huey Lewis, I do, but come to think of it, Fore! isn’t such a good album.  Sports is WAYYYY better.  Maybe if we listened to Sports before we started on the chicken coop we would have been in better shape.  As it turns out a lot of our lumber wasn’t straight and the floor was out of square.  Our typical mantra of “the chickens won’t notice” had been working all along, but Taryn’s dad assured us that while the chickens probably wouldn’t notice that the floor wasn’t square, the walls certainly would.

The next day he came over with lots of tools and laid some knowledge down on us. In addition to being witty, Taryn’s dad is a construction superintendent and oversees the building of giant buildings in the city, meaning he knows A LOT about construction.  We learned a few tricks of the trade and got the posts re-dug and the floor squared off.  He even helped us to frame the back wall.

To keep us company while we worked he brought Taryn’s family dog, Sandy.  She had a lot of fun running around the yard, barking at my neighbor, and falling into the holes we were digging for the posts.  She even got some pieces of roast beef out of the deal.  Sweet.

The major things we learned were as follows:

• Quality lumber is very important, always go to your local lumber yard
• A chop saw is awesome, and one must be acquired soon
• Screws allow you to easily “adjust” and “remove” where necessary without a mess
• Chalk lines - who knew how useful these things were!
• A framing square is a very important tool
• Framing walls “on the floor” and lifting them into place is the proper way to do it.
• Layout where the studs are going to on the header and footer of the wall, then just nail them into place.
• If you dig the holes carefully with a small shovel, you do not need a post hole digger for footers.
• Whenever possible a large piece of plywood should be used and small pieces should be added on, rather than several equal sized pieces. (Our floor was a foot bigger in width and length than the plywood)  The large piece of plywood will help hold the frame square.
• Experience is the greatest teacher, unless you have a teacher that happens to have a lot of experience.

Seriously, Taryn’s dad brought the project home.  The practical applications of what he showed us are far reaching and will stay with us for all our future construction endeavors.  We drew up the plans to the chicken coop ourselves, and when you’re looking at it on paper, it seems just as easy as cutting the pieces to the right size and fastening them together.  Unfortunately that explanation glosses over a lot of practical areas where serious knowledge is required.  Even just proper use of tools.

It’s really something that is hard to explain but easy to observe.  Watching Taryn’s dad and listening to his advice saved us countless hours of learning by trial and error.  We were able to square the floor, set the footers, and frame the back wall with his help.  Using the tricks he showed us, and the tools he was kind enough to leave with us for the rest of the project, I was able to frame the front wall one morning before having to go help tend the sheep.

He’s going to have to come back and show us how to put on the roof next, because we’re totally in the dark on that one.

Progress After a Day with Taryn’s Dad and a few hours on my own framing the front wall:

This entry was posted on April 27th, 2009 and is filed under Chickens, Construction.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.