Made by Hand (13 page)

After that, I avoided the turkeys as much as possible, fearful they’d do the same thing to me if they got the chance. Once in a while, a tom would charge and chase me across the yard, which made me like the birds even less.

My grandparents also kept chickens, and I liked them much more. For one thing, they were a lot smaller and less intimidating. For another, they were curious and clever, and their reptilian manner and sharp eyes gave them a trace of ancient mysteriousness. I liked the odd sounds they made and the way they operated as a seemingly telepathic team.

Twenty-four billion chickens are alive today, making them the most successful birds on the planet. Their popularity is due to the fact that they’re a cheap source of nutrition for people. Being social creatures, chickens flock together, don’t like to wander far from home, and are easy to pen. They can get by on little more than bugs, seeds, lizards, weeds, and table scraps. They’re prolific egg layers, and they grow quickly. A broiler chick goes from the roost to the roaster in just six weeks.

Chickens were of great interest to Charles Darwin. In 1868 he catalogued every breed he could find and discovered that they all originated from the wild jungle fowl of southern Asia, which looks like a smaller, more colorful version of the brown leghorn. People began domesticating the birds around five thousand years ago by providing them with food scraps and a place to roost. Over time, selective breeding led to species that could lay large eggs on an almost daily basis.

A few years ago Mister Jalopy gave me a book he’d picked up at a garage sale, called
Living with Chickens
. He gave it to me because I had told him that I planned to turn the dilapidated shack behind our house into a chicken coop. Unfortunately, every time I went out back to look at the shack, I lost all motivation to do so. It was full of cans of paint, expired swimming pool chemicals, rusty metal shelving, and filthy layers of dried leaves. The sight of the mess would send me straight back to my home office to browse the Web, a place where “cleaning up” means dragging files into a cartoon trash can.

I finally got the push I needed when I met one of our neighbors at a block party. At the time, we were living in a rural pocket of Tarzana called Melody Acres, which was zoned for farm animals and horses. The neighbor invited my family to see her chickens. Her Plymouth Barred Rocks were attractive birds, with black-and-white-striped feathers. Sarina, who was ten at the time, got cuddly with the rooster, which reminded me of the way she had held a neighbor’s chickens in Rarotonga a few years earlier.

When our neighbor started pulling fat pink-brown eggs from the nesting boxes, that clinched it. I swore to myself that I’d fix the shack into a proper chicken coop.

The next day I put on my rattiest clothes and began pulling the crap out. It was hard to believe how much stuff had been in there. I carted it all to a far corner of the yard, and the resulting pile looked like three sheds’ worth of junk.

Once I got everything out, I gave the shack a thorough hosing-down, inside and out. The concrete floor tilted slightly, and because there was no drain, the water pooled. It took about twenty minutes with a push broom to get the water out the door. The dirt in front turned to mud, which gave me the excuse I needed to stop for the day.

The next afternoon, I removed a broken wooden gate attached to the left side of the shack, as it served no purpose other than to scrape me with the rusty nail poking out of it whenever I walked by. I put the lumber in the junk pile destined for the dump. I also had to deal with the fence that separated my property from my neighbor Richard’s. Originally attached to the side wall of the shack, it had become separated from it over time and was now leaning into Richard’s yard, close to falling over. I tried pulling the fence upright so I could resecure it, but it wouldn’t budge. I discovered that it was being pushed away by a fast-growing woody vine ten feet away from the shack.

I started lopping away at the vine with a chainsaw and garden shears. The lawn had been watered earlier in the day, so I quickly became covered in mud. Sharp branches poked me at every opportunity. The coop, the fence, and the vines were conspiring against me. It was a classic case of resistentialism
,
a word coined by Paul Jennings in a 1949 essay for
The Spectator
about his theory that things have a secret agenda to make us miserable by fighting back against our efforts to use them. Resistentialism, he wrote, is encapsulated in the old French saying “
Les choses sont contre nous
” (“Things are against us”).

While Jennings’s essay is a humor piece, there’s some truth in it. Inanimate objects don’t have intentions, of course, but people often react as though they do. Have you ever cursed at a snagged garden hose or smacked a cabinet door that pinched you? If you have, you are a resistentialist. I wonder how many people have sworn off DIY because they have the feeling that things are against them.

Carla came out to see where I’d disappeared to, and when she saw me, she asked me what I was doing. I explained that I was fix-ing the coop.

“But the coop is over there,” she said, pointing to where it stood, ten feet away.

“Things are against me,” I explained.

She went back in the house.

Several hours later, I was sweaty, mud-caked, and tired, but I had finished clearing the vines away from the shack, and the fence was free to move. Richard kindly offered to push against the fence from his side while I fastened it to the shack’s sturdy vertical posts.

With these preliminary matters out of the way, I had a blank slate to work with. I inspected the shack and made a to-do list:

The door was disintegrating. Pieces of wood at the bottom were crumbling apart, making the door wobble when I opened or closed it. Not only that, but the design looked ugly to me. Why had it been braced with pieces of wood forming an H inside the frame? It didn’t appear especially sound. I was eager to get rid of it and make a new one from scratch.

I took the old door off, laid it on the ground, and measured its dimensions. Then I went to Home Depot to buy some lumber and wood fasteners. Wandering down the lumber aisle with my shopping cart, I came across some appropriately sized pieces called “furring strips.” I didn’t know what a furring strip was, but it looked like a good choice for a lightweight chicken coop door, so I bought enough to make the frame plus an extra 50 percent to allow for screwups.

I also bought a rectangle of plywood, screws, and some metal Land T brackets.

I used a clamping miter box to cut the 45-degree angles for the frame and used the brackets to join the pieces. Things were going surprisingly well until I tried to attach the fourth piece and discovered that the furring strips I bought were so twisted that I couldn’t complete the frame without seriously warping it. The wood was against me.

Fortunately, I had that extra piece of furring strip, and it seemed straight, so I cut it to size. But again, the frame wouldn’t fit together! Each piece was apparently twisted just a little, and when I put the four together, the twistiness was multiplied fourfold. I didn’t want to make another trip to Home Depot unless I absolutely had to, so I forged ahead with the less-than-perfect materials at hand, forcing the pieces into position.

I screwed the old hinges onto the finished door and attached it to the shack. The door was still warped, but it turned out that the warping worked in my favor, giving the door a springiness that kept it tight against the jamb when it was latched shut. I felt as though I had tricked the warped wood into submission. Its orneriness had backfired on it. Take that, wood!

All said and done, it had taken a couple of days to build and install the door. Next, I went to work on the roof. When I was in the third grade, my classroom was a corrugated-metal Quonset hut on the agricultural plains of Colorado, and ever since then I’d longed for a building of my own with a corrugated-tin roof. The chicken coop would be my chance to realize that dream. Home Depot had what I needed: roof panels and a tin piece that fit along the peak. (I also bought a roll of screened wire to replace the rusty chicken wire I’d ripped out.)

While I was on the roof tearing off the old tiles (more junk for the junk pile), Richard came over to chat. He told me that the people who used to live in my house had used the shack as a rabbit hutch. One by one, the baby rabbits would escape and dig under the fence into his yard, where they’d fall in the pool and drown. He’d find them in the filter basket.

I assured Richard that my chicken coop was going to be the Fort Knox of poultry enclosures.

The grimy business of removing the disintegrated shingles was delayed by a piece of wood screwed into the roof at a crazy angle. I’m guessing that the rabbit tycoon used it to patch up the plywood under the shingles; eventually the plywood became so rotten it split.

I thought about removing the entire panel of plywood and replacing it. I decided against it, though, because it measured about six by seven feet and was very heavy. Instead, I used my jigsaw to cut off the rotten part, then replaced it with a couple of fence slats from the gate I’d torn down a day or two earlier. This marked the first of many trips to my junk pile to scavenge for materials. I eventually came to the realization that my projects tended to supply themselves as I tore down the old to build the new.

I was having an easy time screwing the lightweight galvanized-tin panels into the roof. I didn’t even have to use tin snips, because three panels made a perfect fit on each side of the roof—at least they did on the front side. I hit a snag on the back: After I’d screwed down two panels, I laid down the third and was surprised to see that a wedge-shaped area of the roof plywood was exposed. Had I placed the other panels down at an angle so that they weren’t square with the roof? I checked carefully and decided that I had indeed messed up. I unscrewed the panels and started again, trying as much as possible to keep everything square. But the third panel still didn’t cover the roof. I had to conclude that the roof wasn’t built square.

In his book
A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder,
Michael Pollan writes about the nearly disastrous repercussions of accidentally skewing a corner away from a perfect right angle in the frame of a small office-house he was building in the woods near his house. Because of that one mistake, he had to make custom angle cuts for every window and door frame, for the floor, for the roof, and for almost everything else. It was a nightmare. He finished the house, but it took much longer than it would have if everything had been square to begin with.

Now I faced the same problem. I saw three options: (1) I could try to rebuild the roof to make it square, (2) I could buy an extra tin panel and trim a wedge-shaped section to cover the exposed area, or (3) I could cut the overhanging portion of the plywood to match the edge of the tin roof panel. I went with option 3. I figured, if it looked terrible, I would go ahead and rebuild the roof to make it square.

I got on a ladder and used a jigsaw to cut a wedge of plywood from the roof. The overhanging wood almost touched the roof beam at the lower end of the roof slope. My hopes weren’t high that this would work out, but I went ahead and screwed the final roof panel onto the plywood. What do you know—it went from ugly to barely passable. I asked Carla to come out and take a look. I didn’t tell her about the problem, because I wanted to see if she would notice it on her own. She’s pretty observant.

“It looks great.”

At this stage, my chicken coop had been cleaned out, given a new door, and topped with a tin roof. The next step was to add a fourth wall. The previous owner had run chicken wire from floor to ceiling on one side instead of building a wall. This allowed dust and leaves to blow in. I don’t understand why he did it that way. His rabbits must have been dirty and miserable. I wanted clean, happy chickens.

My first thought was to go to Home Depot and pick up some plywood, but, as Mister Jalopy once told me, as soon as you cross your property line, you might as well write off the possibility of getting anything else done that day. Remembering this sage advice, I opted to use whatever scraps I had lying around the yard. I found a nice, solid piece of plywood left over from a remodeling job done on our house the previous summer. That took care of the first vertical foot or so. What would I use for the next couple of feet?