I think I should have titled this post "the grossest pictures we ever hope to show you". We have finally started working on the chicken coop and it has been a very slow process. Once you see the photos, you might understand why we have to drag ourselves out there to keep working. It's simply disgusting, actually beyond disgusting. We will probably need two more days of demo and cleanup and then we can start rebuilding, insulating, painting, etc. That's our plan for the rest of this week.
The coop consists of three small rooms connected to each other and it's about 700 square feet. We started out wearing a bit of protection and after day one realized that we needed goggles, hoods, better respirators, etc. Anthony thought I was being dramatic when I originally told him we needed to wear them. After we found an unbelievable amount of silt and raccoon crap, he agreed with me. Here are some photos of where we're at right now.
We began by pulling off the walls, starting with the largest room in the coop. Then Anthony took the ceiling down while I started on the adjacent room's walls. Each time he would get ready to pull a ceiling panel down he would yell "RUN!" and we would both run out until all of the dust cleared the building. Like I said, incredibly gross. And there's no end to this miniature house of horrors. Apparently raccoons were living here for quite some time as evidenced by the large volume of their poop in the sides of the walls.
Me in my high-tech poop removal suit
We were able to get everything out of the first room, except for the ginormous dusty spiderwebs. I guess we are saving the best for last! The window frames have almost disintegrated, so we will need new windows as well as new doors.
We started on the second room, but haven't found any more poop, thank goodness. The ceiling is already about to fall in this room, so it should be a bit easier on us than the first room. The third room will only need to be cleaned and painted because it doesn't have any fiberboard or whatever the wall material was in the first two rooms. Here's where we are, smack-dab in the middle of this mess. Again, at least it's not a giant pile of varmint poo. Can you tell I have PTSD from all of the crap in the walls?
Here's what the third room looks like. It has a giant bin where I'm assuming feed bags used to be stored. The windows are intact in this room, but don't open. We found another wooden dummy egg hidden in the bottom of the bin, so exciting! For those of you that don't know, dummy eggs are placed in nesting boxes to encourage the hens to lay. Some people use golf balls to do the same thing. The egg that we found had a chain attached to it. Super cool.
The nest egg we found
At least one of the rooms looks like it's almost finished, it's really the only thing pushing me to keep going.
So tomorrow when you're thinking how great we have it, living on a farm, picking wild asparagus and making strawberry jam, you can instead feel sorry for us. Because we will be knee deep in crap. Wish us luck!