After going back and forth for a while, we finally decided to pull the trigger and get some chickens for egg laying! I had been talking to my girlfriend about them and she convinced us it was a great idea. So we went to Ace and bought four baby chicks. They were absolutely adorable! The gentleman who helped us buy them has become a good friend actually, and we asked that he give us chicks who would be good tempered, good egg layers and do well in the hot weather. He picked out four different breeds and we took them home.

For the next 2 months we watched them grow like weeds and they each developed little personalities. It was fun to take them out of their box and let them run around the garage. The only problem was that they pooped SO much and poor Tommy was getting sick of all the chicken bombs. Haha.

I knew we needed a good coop and I wanted Tommy to build one, but we were pressed for time and he had so much on his plate, I decided to just buy one instead. We found one online that was shipped down from Oregon, but when we opened up the package we were absolutely shocked at the poor quality. We decided to try and make it work and set it up out against the block wall with a few modifications.

However, we found out pretty quickly that it had not been completely waterproofed and after a couple days of rain, the chicks looked like drowned rats running around in the mud. Plus, it was SO small. I couldn’t believe they had promoted this thing being able to house SIX chickens! Baloney! They were growing at such a rapid rate and living in such close quarters I knew they were getting stressed.  This can cause major problems with a flock. So, I basically forced Tommy to make a coop that I found on Craigslist instead of spending a ton more money and getting another piece of crap. It was an awesome design and he agreed it would be much better.

Three of the girls are laying right now. The golden girl up front has not started yet. So far we’ve been getting about  15-20 eggs a week and they are delicious!  They will not become adults until about a year old, so they still have some growing to do. I’m happy we made this decision. These girls have been a lot of fun and it’s been really cool to have our boys experience something like this.

*** As of November 9th, 2016, we’ve had quite the revelation happen. Izzy has now become Ozzy. We found out this morning he was a rooster! Crowing and squawking to his hearts content. Tommy wasn’t very thrilled but I’ve insisted that we keep him around unless he starts to get unmanageable. We are not going to make him chicken dinner, but rather if the time comes, we’ll sell him off to a good home looking for a good rooster. Hopefully that never happens, but I’m afraid that nature is much more powerful than nurture in situations like these,  so we’ll just have to see what happens.  Fingers crossed! =)