Day 1 of the chicken coop

We got up at 7:30 to prepare for thinking about building our chicken coop. A handy friend offered to build the actual coop in exchange for beer and eggs. We gladly took him up on his offer. So, today our goal was to build the run, or at least the frame. We got our wood from North City Lumber. They offer a 10% discount if you pay in cash or check. I'd been meaning to start carrying my checkbook around more often but it seemed like such a relic I just didn't bother. Now I think I'll start again. There's something calm about counting cash or writing a check that doesn't exist when you flip a card out of your wallet. But I paid with plastic. Then we got the tamper and nails at the Ace in Maple Leaf (the best hardware store in the city as far as I'm concerned). No 6' wire. So, by now we're just shooting for the frame. At home we roll up our sleeves and start digging. It's way easier than last summer when we dug out the front garden bed. The grounds been soaking for six months and it was like slicing through cake. Really dirty, worm-ridden, clay-like cake. So that went well. Then friends came by and it was time to celebrate the first hole with a beer. And then a second beer. And then by making a fire to burn the mammoth pile of branches that were shed off the two poplars over the winter. And then we moved on to the creation of the second hole. This was a little trickier since its future location was right where I'd dug a hole last summer for a hammock post. I'd poured concrete, thoughtlessly, and the post hadn't set right and went crooked while I was reading in the hammock last August. So we pulled out the post, set a cinder block over the hole, and left it. Until today. So, one of my buddies, who up until this point has not bothered to take off her purse, gets a good grip on the tamped and wails into the concrete. Problem solved. Removing the concrete basically digs the second hole for us. Then we deliberated for about fifteen minutes about this massive hulk of a salvaged door we were going to use and decided it was too much. So, let's just not worry about digging the last hole for the other door post until we figure out our door plan. More work chipped away without actually being done. Then Molly and I try to put the corner post in. We're using a classic technique honed by my sister and I growing up on a hobby farm on Bainbridge Island. We put our post in the ground, two feet down, and dump some good rocks into the hole, tamp them down, being sure to keep the post level. Then goes in dirt, tamped. Then more rocks. Etc. This is more precise then it sounds. And when we were almost finished our post had turned about forty five degrees, irking my not-so-inner perfectionist. It was ripped out. This was the point when Molly finally got dirty, getting on her hands and knees to try to pry the jammed rocks out of the hole with her tiny fingers. Now, Tara comes over to save the day. She'd been attacking on of the bigger poplar limbs with a hatchet, successfully. A tidy pile of firewood was accumulating under the eve of the house. So, out comes the post. We begin trying a second time, get irritated, decide concrete is the best route and not something we want to drive to the store for, crack open beer three and disperse to putter around the yard before calling it a day. So, we have two two-foot holes in the backyard, a pile of lumber in the back of my truck, and a two neatly divided poplar limbs stacked by the chimney. And we took down last summer crap fence. All in all a successful day of minimal work on my part.