Made by Hand (15 page)

Carla wouldn’t taste the first egg I collected. I did so only because I felt I needed to set an example for the rest of the family; I had no appetite for it. I knew I was being silly. I’d never felt this way about a store-bought egg. But store eggs came in cartons kept on refrigerated supermarket shelves, not directly from the warm, gooey cloaca of a bird. My family consumed animal products that came packaged in containers; we’d never given much thought to the source. (I’ve come to learn that this is a normal reaction. When my kids bring new friends over and show them the eggs in the nesting box, many of the kids are surprised to be told that they’re edible. We give them some to take home, and they often keep them as toys, coloring them and even making little houses for them.)

I cooked the first egg in a little butter. The yolk was bright orange and stood up firmly above the clear white. I took this to be a good thing, certainly better than the flattish pale yellow yolks I was accustomed to eating, but at this point any difference between my hens’ and store-bought eggs only served to remind me that I was eating something my pet had excreted. I tried to clear my mind before eating the first forkful, but I couldn’t get the image out of my head. I ate the egg anyway. It tasted different from the ones I was used to—more flavorful, and fresher. I was still too freaked out to appreciate it, though.

Eventually I learned to savor the superior qualities of my hens’ eggs. My wife and kids came around, too. Now the pleasure center in my brain lights up every time I walk to the coop, look in the nesting box, and see a trio or quartet of Silly Putty-colored eggs waiting for me. It’s like an Easter egg hunt every day. They are so beautiful and perfectly formed that they seem to have been made by an artist.

It’s hard to be a homesteader if you keep changing homes. I’ve moved twenty-one times since I was born. When we moved into that restored 1930s farmhouse in Tarzana in 2004, I hoped it would be the last time. It was a perfect home for us, or so we thought. It had about a dozen different kinds of fruit trees and a half acre of flat land that could be used for things like outbuildings, animal pens, greenhouses, gardens, and fish ponds. The house itself was bright, open, and cheerful. I’d already killed the front lawn, and I was getting ready to add some raised-bed planters to grow vegetables there. I’d staked out an area of our side yard for starting a fruit orchard. Our friends liked hanging out in the large room that extended the length of the house. The chicken coop was big, rainproof, and comfortable for my hens, which were producing an average total of four nice eggs every day, and they had the run of the yard. It had turned out to be the perfect place to explore self-sufficiency and DIY living.

But in the spring of 2009 we moved to Studio City, for a few reasons. The elementary school in the district was excellent. The climate was milder than in Tarzana, which is the hottest town in Los Angeles. (Summers in Tarzana are scorchers, with multiday runs of three-digit temperatures.) Finally, our new place was a few houses away from Carla’s sister, who had a daughter Jane’s age. For all these reasons, it made sense to move.

On the other hand, the new house didn’t have a chicken coop; I was going to have to either make or buy a new one. For weeks I vacillated. I was tempted by the colorful and stylishly rounded coops made by Eglu, which look a little like the early candy-colored iMac. But I couldn’t bring myself to buy a coop made out of plastic. After Carla’s complaints the year before about the “hideous” black plastic garden cart, I had been converted to a plastic hater, and there was no going back.

I looked online at the dozens and dozens of wood chicken coops for sale and became paralyzed by the abundance of choices. I couldn’t make up my mind. While each coop was different, they all shared something in common that bothered me: They were unnecessarily complicated. Some were built to look like miniature barns, others like little prairie schoolhouses or cottages. I didn’t want superfluous ornamentation or a shape that would make it hard to access the interior. I wanted something dead simple: a box raised off the ground with room inside for a nesting box and a roosting perch, nothing else. I decided I’d have to build such a coop myself.

I started to design one using Google SketchUp, a great free application for designing all kinds of stuff, from birdhouses to barns. But after a while I realized I was probably overthinking it. I drove to the lumber store and took a look at what they had. I found six-foot-tall, five-inch-wide fence slats that would work for the walls. The length of the slats dictated the dimensions of the coop: It would be six feet long and three feet deep. Standing in the lumber aisle, I pulled out my phone and used the calculator function to estimate how many slats I’d need: twenty-one. I came across some two-by-twos that looked strong enough to serve as the four stilts keeping the coop off the ground. I bought seven eight-foot-long sticks of the two-by-twos and an equal number of one-by-twos for framing the coop. I also bought a roll of chicken wire (or “poultry fencing,” as the manufacturer called it), a pair of door hinges, and a corded electric drill to drive the screws. It took some effort to fit all this into my Volkswagen Beetle, but by folding down the backseat and leaning the front passenger seat all the way forward, I managed to cram everything in.

I drove to our new house (which we hadn’t moved into yet) with the materials I’d purchased and carried them into the backyard. It was a warm, clear spring day—coop-building weather. As I measured, cut, drilled, and assembled the pieces of wood according to the rough plan in my head, I thought about how far I’d come since I started my experiment to do and make more things myself. I felt confident about this project because I’d become more familiar with the way lumber behaves. I understood the functions and limitations of the tools. And, perhaps most important, I was comfortable with the idea that I might screw it up. Who cared if I did? As long as I eventually produced a chicken coop that kept my hens safe and dry, it didn’t matter what happened.

The coop was coming along nicely, but I still had the problem of how to deal with all the coyotes in the surrounding hills. (We didn’t have coyotes back in Tarzana.) I contemplated building some kind of pen to contain the chickens. The thought depressed me. I didn’t think my hens, used to free-range living, would enjoy being fenced in. I surely had the happiest chickens on the planet. They had roamed the half acre of our Tarzana home, scratching in the mulch for bugs, nibbling on grass and weeds and toadstools, and taking long dust baths and naps in the sun. It would be sad to take all that away from them. What was I going to do?

I put the thought aside for the time being. I wasn’t able to finish the coop in one afternoon, so the next morning I went back to the new house with Carla. I told her I didn’t want to pen in the chickens. She reminded me that she had grown up in the Studio City hills and that she had seen a lot of coyotes there. If I let the chickens run around unprotected, it would be their death sentence. I agreed with her. I would have to create a barrier of some kind to keep the coyotes from my chickens. The Studio City house had no front yard to speak of, and the backyard was a fairly narrow strip of grass. Neither would really do for a pen. I started to wonder whether I should even keep chickens here. The people who moved into our Tarzana house told me that they were looking forward to using the coop there to raise chickens of their own. I wondered if I should just give them mine and be done with it.

As I mulled this possibility, I opened the gate to the swimming pool at the Studio City house to look at the area behind it, where I planned to keep my bees. The ground was sloped, and a lot of poorly maintained pepper trees grew there. But it was peaceful, and it had a nice woodsy feel. As I looked around, I realized that the area was completely enclosed by a six-foot-high chain-link fence. The only way to get in or out was through gates. I could put the coop here and give my chickens the run of this shady, grassy, wild hill. They’d love it.

I found a couple of holes in the fence I’d need to patch, but other than that, it would be very difficult for a coyote or other predator to jump it. And the chickens would be safe inside the coop even if a coyote did manage to get over or under the fence after dark.

It wasn’t hard moving the chickens from our old house to the new one. We waited until they were asleep at night, then Sarina and I lifted them one at a time from the perch and deposited them in the back of our car. They peeped with mild protest but were very calm during the twenty-minute drive. Chickens are good travelers.

The new coop I made was small, basically a place for the chickens to sleep at night and lay eggs during the day. I couldn’t in good conscience leave the birds in it all morning while they waited for me to wake up and open the door so they could scratch around the yard. The coop in Tarzana had been large enough to allow them to walk and stretch their legs. The new one would literally keep them cooped up.

For the first couple of days after moving into our new house, I set my alarm for 6:30 a.m. so I could let the chickens out. Even at this early hour, they were already clamoring to begin their day of foraging. I’ve never liked getting up early, and I couldn’t imagine having to wake up at that time every morning. I started leaving the large coop door open at night so they could come and go as they pleased, but the chickens didn’t like having the door open in the day, because they wanted privacy when laying their eggs in the nesting box. I started finding eggs hidden in bushes and little hollows against the fences.

Adding a small door with a ramp could easily solve that part of the problem. That way I could keep the large door closed all the time, opening it only when I needed to inspect the interior. The ideal solution would be to make an automatic door that was small enough to give them a feeling of privacy when it was open and would close after they’d settled onto their perch for the evening.

I told Carla about my idea, and she was dubious. “How can you trust it to work?” she said. “You have to have a person open and close the door.” I said that when we were home, we’d always check to make sure the automatic door worked, but it would really come in handy when we went out at night and saw a late movie, or when we went away for the weekend. She remained unconvinced.

Googling “automatic chicken door” returned a few different designs and commercial products but fewer than I would have expected, given that millions of people keep chickens. Most were designed to either open in the morning or close at night but not both. I didn’t want a single-function door. I wanted something that would allow us to leave for a day or two without having to hire a neighbor to let the chickens out in the morning and close the door at night.

I eventually found a design that seemed to work for me. John Beaty, the director of technology programs at Northeastern University in Boston, had built an ingenious door opener out of a motorized drapery puller, used for opening curtains automatically. Drapery pullers are beloved by home-automation enthusiasts—DIYers who use devices to automatically control lights, adjust the temperature of rooms, trigger video cameras, turn appliances off and on, open garage doors, and so on. The beauty of the drapery puller is that when current is applied to it, it turns its motor in one direction (opening the curtain). When current is applied again, the motor reverses direction. Beaty’s design incorporated a door that slid up and down, attached to a cord. The drapery puller was plugged into an ordinary timer switch (the kind people use when they go on vacation to turn a lamp on in the evening so potential thieves think the house is occupied). When the timer turned the power on (once in the morning and again at night), a pulley would draw a cord attached to the chicken door up or down.

I ordered a drapery puller online for about $80. I already had an appliance timer switch, and a contractor had left a large pile of scrap material on the side of our house that I was able to pick through for some of the other stuff I needed. I found a length of metal roof flashing to serve as channels for the door to slide up and down in. Beaty had used a thin sheet of aluminum for his door, but I couldn’t find one, and I couldn’t find any wood that seemed right for the job.

Then I came across a piece of masonite (sporting a painting I’d started and abandoned) that would fit the bill. I cut it to size and inserted it in the slides. Then I attached the drapery puller above the door, hung a chain over its pulley, and attached one end of the chain to the door and the other end to a piece of metal that weighed about the same as the door. (Balancing the load on either end would keep the motor from having to work so hard.) I plugged the puller into an extension cord to test it out. The motor kicked in and lifted the door right up. It worked! I fine-tuned its operation by adjusting a couple of little dials on the drapery puller that controlled how long the motor turned in each direction.

When I was done building it, I brought Carla out to show her how it worked. I opened the main door so she could see the mechanics of the system. I plugged it into the extension cord, and the motor hummed, lifting the door.

“That’s so cute!” she exclaimed. I unplugged the cord and plugged it back in to lower the door. “I didn’t think it would be so neat,” she added.

I live for moments like these.

But I still wasn’t finished. I couldn’t have a hundred-foot extension cord going from the house to the coop. It was a safety hazard and an eyesore. It needed a permanent power solution. There was a swimming pool pump about twenty-five feet away from the coop. I could tap into it to power my chicken door. Luckily, my father, an electrical engineer by training, was in town helping us settle into our new house. I happily accepted his offer to help me with this part of the project.

My dad and I went to the hardware store and bought some outdoor electrical wires, an underground conduit, an outdoor outlet box, and some other odds and ends. He knew exactly what to get, having done outdoor wiring before. When I was younger and would go with him to the hardware store, I paid little attention to what he was buying or why. Now I realized that this electrical stuff could come in very handy. So I paid close attention.