The Henhouse: Part 2

Site and Foundation
Finding the right spot for the henhouse took some thought. I wanted the open screens to have fresh air without becoming a giant wind scoop for cold northern winds during the winter, but I was also up against the topography of the yard. The property sits on the edge of a long ridge, so the entire back yard slopes gently away from the house to the West. This is great for planting, because everything can be arranged for plenty of western and southern sun and is blessed with just the right amount of drainage, but it's not so steep as to cause erosion problems. However when setting up outbuildings, getting a level foundation means digging or balancing the thing on top of tall piers. Unfortunately the shed is already sitting on the best spot, so the coop ended up being next to it to the east.

The lovely site:

A side note on the property: when we bought the house in '06 I was excited by the potential the enormous back yard represented, but daunted by its unkempt condition. A 120 square foot chunk in the SW corner of the property was completely overrun by Himalayan Blackberry, and my efforts clear the area yielded a wall of junk and trash big enough to fill the back of a 30' truck--the previous owners had apparently gotten in to the habit of using this corner as a garbage dump. I'll tell that story later, but suffice it to say the yard yielded some of the pier blocks pictured here, thus saving me some cash.

Lesson Learned: Salvage what you find around you. There are three reasons for this: First, it's cheaper. If you can pick something up off the ground and make use of it (assuming, of course, that it doesn't belong to someone else--there's a hard line between salvage and larceny), you've saved yourself the cost of buying new, and maybe the time needed to go shopping for the thing. Second, everything we manufacture has an embodied cost of materials, energy and emitted carbon. If you make use of existing materials, you're reducing the overall environmental impact of your project. Third, we are likely entering a period of history in which when we won't always be able to thoughtlessly motor off to the big box for a hinge or a brick, and if you get into the habit of scrounging now, your instincts for the potential hidden in found objects will be just that much sharper.

I briefly considered pouring a concrete foundation for the coop, but decided against it. While the concrete would have been much easier to maintain and infinitely more resistant to rot and rodent damage, there just wasn’t a sufficiently level spot to pour without a great deal of digging. As you see from the next image, there's over a full foot of drop at this site even over the 8' length of the foundation. I would have either had to pour a very deep slab--wasteful of materials and extremely expensive--or I would have had to dig the whole thing in, which would have had the level of the foundation at or below the ground level, making water seepage an issue from the slope.

After a great deal of fiddling, digging, and cursing later, I finally had the basic framework of the foundation built. The three cross members are treated 4x4s, with treated 2x4s on the end. I filled in with additional 2x4s on steel hanger brackets to give the floor some stability, but these aren't pictured here.

And finally, the completed floor. The floor is comprised of two sheets of 3/4" ply, with a heavy coat of exterior latex on the ground-facing side. It's worth mentioning that this took a lot longer than I anticipated, which would be an omen for the rest of the project.

Next up, decidedly amateur framing, walls and more scrounging!

Revisit: Part 1