As mentioned, I’ve been working on designing a second chicken coop. See an earlier post for some plans, though they’ve been tweaked a bit since then.

Once I got the plans fairly locked down, the next step was to work on a spreadsheet that lists all of the materials needed to build it:

This is broken up by a bunch of things to be delivered by Home Depot (including lumber, siding, roofing, etc); things to pick up in-store; and things that won’t be needed till later.  Within each of those, there are columns for the parts of the coop (floor, each wall, roof, run, etc), the location in-store to make finding them easier, and other details.

Yesterday I pulled the trigger on the project: I went to Home Depot to buy the in-store stuff, which was primarily a table saw, but also some minor tools like squares and such, and also to look over the items on my order list, to make sure I made the right choices.

Then the big step — placing the order for all the material to be delivered. (An excellent deal, by the way: hundreds of items for one very reasonable fixed delivery charge.)

All that will arrive on Wednesday, so I’ll be able to start building after then, weather permitting. I will use a large canopy to keep the construction dry, so I could do at least some of it under that, but it’ll be more pleasant to work when it isn’t raining.

I plan to document the process on this blog, so stay tuned! Here’s hoping I haven’t made a huge mistake. 😬