A Snoop Around the Coop — Drinking With Chickens- Craft co*cktail recipes (2024)

So. I'm finally letting you guys have a snoop around ours. We've been in the midst of what is probably our fifth renovation in five years, so it's only now to the point where it's feeling a little bit photo-ready. Yeah, you read that right. Five renovations in five years. You want to know why? It's because we didn't know what the hell we were doing in the beginning. We've learned us some stuff. And we keep figuring out how to make things work a little bit better. Plus, anyone who knows me knows I love a good home makeover. And it costs a little less money to take my DIY angst out on the chicken home instead of the people home. Just a little less. My husband might disagree with me on that.

First things first: though we free-range our birds during the day, I gave up letting them free range our entire property after about a year. There were two main reasons for this. Firstly, they have their own damned ideas about how my garden should look and if I turned my back, they would implement their plans with frighteningly swift and thorough devastation. Secondly: hawks. The more wide open the area the chickens hang out in, the more likely aerial predators are gonna have a go at them. We had some close calls. So, we have a small garden at the back of our property that is fully fenced and hemmed in by tall shrubbery where they can free-range comfortably and not only be fairly well-protected from predators, but are forced to keep their grubby little chicken claws off my main garden. We call it, unsurprisingly, the Chicken Garden. I let them out for supervised romps in the main garden quite often--especially during happy hour. Which is why the usual soundtrack to garden happy hour is muttered strings of expletives as I shoo the brats off of one plant or another.

As I stated earlier, the chicken garden is located down a lovely little path, just beyond our garage at the very back of our yard, essentially spanning the entire width of the property. Just inside the gate is where you'll find the frog fountain and my collection of monochromatic bird houses. Because where else could I put them?

Stay on the path and it veers right passed the coop and will come to a sitting area at the end of the path. Hang a left at the froggie fountain and you'll go to what is essentially a storage yard behind the garage. More on that later.

We insulated and soundproofed the coop and designed it so the ventilation (and any chicken noises) get funneled straight at us and not towards any of our neighbors in order to minimize any lovely, early-morning hen-hollering that may or may not happen when the birds are ready to be released but I'm trying to pretend like I can sleep in. And by 'sleep in' I mean 6:30 am on my lucky days. HUZZAH TO CHICKEN-KEEPING!!!!

The coop features a small attached run, which really isn't something we use very often. It's basically chicken jail for anyone who's being naughty, but it also allows us to lock up the chickens if we are leaving before dark and won't be back early enough to safely lock them up in the main henhouse (though they put themselves to bed at dusk, it's risky for them to be sitting in their coop with an open door because: raccoons, coyotes, and bears, oh my. Yep. We live in Los Angeles and this is a very true story.). The run has a pass-through door to the roost area, and while the entire space is a bit snug for my birds to live in full-time, it's fine as an infrequent method of locking them up without fully locking them up before dark as needed. The henhouse is divided into an upper roost area (where the girls sleep every night), with an attached set of nesting boxes (that hang off the opposite side of the henhouse from the run, for easy access), and a lower storage area that can be converted into a separate brooder area when we assimilate new birds into the flock (the lower area can be locked off and opened into the run so that new birds have their own roosting and run area and can be safely introduced to the existing flock from behind bars).