Chickens likely won’t fly from this coop

By Emily Adams
www.sunburyexchange.com

    SANGERVILLE — Charlie and Peggy Cleaves have a head turner of a chicken coop.
    Tucked behind their house on the Flanders Hill Road in Sangerville, their coop might just set a new standard in ease of access and cleaning, protection from predators and cozy comfort during Maine’s harsh winters.

Photo courtesy of Emily Adams

QUITE THE BIRDHOUSE — Peggy Cleaves stands in front of her and her husband Charlie’s chicken coop behind their Sangerville home. The coop might just set a new standard in ease of access and cleaning, protection from predators and cozy comfort during Maine’s harsh winters.

    It is debatable who will be happier, the Cleaves or the chickens. Eggs laid in the nesting box can be easily retrieved from the outside by simply lifting a hinged lid. The nesting box, and the whole coop, is thoroughly insulated with foam insulation. The entire structure is cedar harvested from the family farm. The cedar has been coated with wood stain.
    A giant door to the coop swings open so its contents can be scooped out at clean-up time. The interior walls are smooth. No hard-to-clean nooks and crannies here. The interior is coated in acrylic latex paint so it can be hosed out. An electrician installed two, 100-watt light bulbs in the ceiling. They will provide light and double as a heat source on extra cold days. A weatherproof switch mounted to the exterior turns the light on and off.
    Two windows —12 inches by 36 inches and 12 inches by 12 inches and lined with wire mesh — allow for plenty of air circulation. They will be blocked up in the wintertime with two custom windows.
    Chickens walk up a ramp-style chicken ladder to get inside the coop. A sliding door between the coop and coop-run can be opened and closed using a rope-pulley system. The system resembles a guillotine, so the nickname stuck.
    The coop is kept dry by a roof measuring about 86 square feet, including a 9-inch overhang. Hens will not be able to scratch and peck the ground inside the coop-run because the structure sits on a concrete pad to keep it neat. However, there is a full-size door to the coop-run that can be flung open to allow the chickens to range freely on the lawn.
    No one has to stumble in the dark getting to the chicken coop or fumble for chicken feed  because the Cleaves had an outdoor light installed with a motion sensor. The grassy area between the house and coop has been replaced with a wide, 20-foot concrete walkway poured for this project to make snow shoveling easier and keep it from getting muddy in the spring.
    Predators will have trouble breaking into the coop-run to kill chickens or steal eggs when it is shut up for the night. The coop-run is wrapped in stiff, half-inch, wire mesh. Until Princess the bird dog, their 13-year-old Brittany Spaniel, gets used to the hens, the coop-run will be their safe zone.
    To prevent wind from driving snow through the mesh and piling up inside the coop-run, cedar banking was constructed to block the northwest wind.
    In all, the footprint is 12 by 5.5 feet and the roof is 8 feet in the front and about 6.5 feet in the rear.
    As a finishing touch, the perimeter of the coop-run was landscaped with heavy, pre-cast, concrete blocks. They rest in a foot-deep trench lined with crushed rock. The new tenants are full grown, not pullets, and came from Empire Acres farm in Poland.
    Brenda Post, teacher at Piscataquis Community Elementary School in Guilford, incubates and hatches fertilized eggs in her fourth-grade class. Peggy teaches fifth grade across the hall and would get just as excited as the kids and come home and update Charlie. One day last winter, Charlie was delivering firewood to a customer and spied some chickens he liked. They were Golden Comets.
    “He thought we should have chickens,” recalls Peggy, “and I said, ‘Are you serious?’” He said, “‘Yeah, I’m serious.’” And she said, “Okay. If you’re serious about it, go ahead and look into it.”
    Brenda Post loaned them a book with ideas. That triggered online research and road trips to scout out coops.
    Charlie and Peggy do a lot of research before launching a project. Peggy invested years in designing her dream kitchen. Charlie did a thorough investigation before settling on an outdoor pellet boiler. The coop received the same attention.
    Inspiration came from an online photo of a coop called the “Wichita Cabin Coop”, which Charlie tweaked.
    “It’s been a real community project,” says Peggy. The coop was built by a handyman friend. A neighbor and master electrician did the wiring. Their nephew, Justin Cleaves, did the landscaping.
    “This whole project has been such an interesting journey and conversation piece,” says Peggy. “It seems that people who own chickens are very happy to share stories and advice, which we are very thankful to receive.”
    Charlie and Peggy avoid big-box supply stores whenever possible and much prefer to buy locally. So the custom windows and supplies came from Dover True Value. The chicken feed and feeder came from Foxcroft Agway. The Redi-Scapes landscaping blocks were from Haley Construction.
    “We’ll be the laughingstock of Piscataquis County” for their “million-dollar chicken coop,” jokes Charlie.
    With any luck, the design will make the chore of tending the coop as easy and pleasant as possible. If it is worth doing, it is worth doing well, they feel. The eggs might not be golden eggs, but they will be happy, says Peggy. “Happy chickens lay happy eggs.” As for the hens, “they’re not going into chicken stew,” she says. “After all this, these are going to be liked winged pets.”