When we first moved in - good grief, nearly 12 months ago now! we kept saying we were going to have to redesign the main chook run.

It was divided into two parts:

One side - the one with the roof wasn't fox / predator secure, so we could only open the door to that side when we were around.

The other side was open to all weather, but secure, which meant that we could have them go into that first thing in the morning / if we weren't home - but their food was out in the rain etc, so it was less than satisfactory.

To solve that problem we'd been hooking up plastic coverings and tarps. The plastic kept getting torn really badly in strong winds (which we get a lot of), or filling up with water in the event of rain - which we didn't think we'd get quite as much of.

But last Saturday night / Sunday we got about 20mls or something - which was startling to say the least (this was the morning of bailing out ducks). In the process - the tarp on the roof of the run collected too much water as the run off is very difficult to camber and well.... the whole lot caved in:

So needless to say, priorities had to be switched around and the redesign undertaken. So with a little work juggling, shower dodging (well pouring rain dodging), and a lot of sweating and swearing in near tropical conditions, we spent bits and pieces of Tuesday through to Friday last week rebuilding. Both of us with the dreaded lurgy just to add to the "fun" of the job.

First step - into Maryborough for posts, wood, wire and stuff.

Then - make the covered in side more secure - which meant closing the gap in the roof, replacing the wire at the end (and putting up better shade cloth), and wiring off the side into the pig shed area - slightly less of a job as number one pig shed has been converted into a chook run for some recent additions (I'll introduce them later).

So we ended up with a laserlight roofed area which works like a treat!

This end still won't be secure until we get the wire run rebuilt and close up that gap along the left hand side - but at least now we have a proper fully weather proof area.

From there, we then had to dismantle the old roof - we found that a fair amount of the wire on the sides of the run wasn't too bad - but the old stupid push inwards door had to go (setting up doors that open inwards is daft - chooks will carefully dig up all the run just inside the door which means you're forever pushing and shoving and fiddling around to try and get through the blasted door).

Onto the run area and with some clear space to work in we had firstly to dig holes and plant 7 poles - which lifted the roof line of the wire run up to the same level as the tin roof. (Digging holes in this clay is a right pain in the ....) Anyway - wood along between the poles and we were ready to string the wire. We both though that was going to be the worst part, but it actually went pretty well - and we soon had a roof in place.

A bit of fiddling around then required to seal some of the gaps between the roof line of the wire run and the roof line of the house - and we could remove the dividing barrier of wire - and lift off!