- It's time for the epic chickies to fly the coop.
(drum trill plays)
(simple guitar riff plays)
- As you can see, I have concocted
probably the world's worst setup
(laughter)
to let the chickens out and kind of roam
in this little front yard area.
They figured a way out that already,
so what we're gonna do in today's video
is give them the outdoor run they deserve,
by creating a sort of section here,
and going all the way into the back.
So by the time this video is over
the chickens should probably have at least
a tripling of their effective run space.
It will all be controlled by the automatic chicken door.
Okay, what we have to do is describe the design,
because there is some serious consideration
when you're letting the hens out, day in and day out.
- Absolutely.
- Which Jacques and Paul, and the team
helped out with.
So why don't you describe the post-strategy?
- Right, so basically we're going to
create a four foot tall fence,
and we're going start from the right of the door.
Cause' we want to make it easy, so that you
don't have to move something out of the way
every time you need to get in.
- Yeah. - Or collect eggs.
- This lets us open the door without having to
open yet another door, and go to the eggs no problem,
instead of making it this whole front area.
- Exactly. - Yeah.
- And then the beauty of having the chicken guard
here is that that's going to control the
access to the chickens into the outdoor run,
so we never have to open that door to let them out.
They can just go out through this little entrance.
So - Which will be
controlled by the sun.
- Exactly. - Exactly.
- And that's the beauty is that you
don't have to worry about letting them in and out,
they could do that all on their own
and this'll make sure they're safe at night.
So it'll be from like here,
I think post out to there.
- Yep.
- Post out to here.
And then I'll seal off this water tank area,
and then we'll talk more about, I guess,
how to close off that area later.
- Yeah, yeah.
- It's gonna open up a lot of space.
- So over here in the back we sort of have the
benefit of having this side already protected
by a predator apron, we have this tank
that's offsetting this, so you can't get over here,
and by just simply putting a board by the shed,
which is already a natural wall,
we're kind of protected in this zone.
And, this is slim enough at the top
that I don't really think any bird of prey
is going to be dive bombing in here.
- Right.
- Though, we really could put some really simple
shielding over if we wanted to.
- Yeah.
- I think we'll probably wait on that, though.
- Yeah, put some bird netting
if we really needed to.
- Yeah, exactly.
And then we don't want the hens to be able
to go behind here, so we'll just put
a very simple gate.
And as we come down this way,
it's sort of the same thing
ending at the end of the coop.
We're just gonna move the mulch out of the way
so we don't hit our irrigation line here,
as well as actually working with a level surface.
So the apron is, of course, right up next to this
section of the coop here.
And I wanna make sure that the post I put in
is as close as possible without being
right-right up next to it.
So I actually have to cut a little bit of
this apron open, okay. - Cool.
- All right, let's get the power planter.
I can't tell you how handy these have become
in the gardening workflow that we have at least.
- Man, I use them probably once a week,
pretty easily.
- Yeah, I mean look at this.
(chill low beat music plays)
- And I just put two cabinet screws in
to hold it in place.
(screwdriver whirs)
And these are nice and thin,
so I don't need to pre-drill.
(screwdriver whirs)
- There we go.
(simple ding)
Just gonna use some Quikcrete on this bad boy,
the fast setting stuff.
(mud sloshing around)
And doing it the lazy style,
where you just dump in the hole.
We'll let it set.
(funky jazz music plays)
Kay', do a quick little stabby stab,
(mud grinding) some movin' it around a bit.
Okay, so now what we wanna do is
try to level this ground a little bit,
cause' we're gonna wanna make sure that
we match up the wiring, you know what I mean?
- Oh yeah.
- And then it's really just solving the back.
- Yeah. - Yeah, okay, cool.
While those are setting, we're just gonna do
a simple solution here instead of a
super long term permanent one.
This is to avoid the hens from getting
underneath the shed somehow.
Probably not gonna happen, but
why not be secure?
- Yeah it's already a big enough gap,
we don't want to encourage digging it.
- So all we're gonna do is just rebar in here,
- Yep.
- and do a quick block.
- So I'm gonna start with the sledge
and then come in with the smaller hammer.
- Yeah, and Jacques gets to use his favorite tool.
(sledgehammer tinks)
- And this will be hopefully fixed shortly.
(sledgehammer tinking)
- All good? - Feel like I need a third.
- You think so?
(inhales)
- I'm feelin' it.
- Why, just cause' you wanna do the activity?
- I mean, I won't go all the way, how about that?
- You always go all the way. (laughter)
(screwdriver whirs)
(laughter)
Getting the shakes over there?
- Oh, I'm trying to get it to widen.
- Yeah.
- [Kevin] How does that work?
- I was just tryin' to eyeball it.
- Oh, just get it close?
I was like, that doesn't level,
(laughter)
I already tried that early.
- All right, don't worry,
I might know what I'm doing.
(carefree lounge music plays)
Yeah, this is just not long enough.
Oh- (drop whistle plays)
One of the hardest things in life,
is having enough straight edges.
- [Kevin] Seriously man.
- That looks pretty straight.
Good enough.
(carefree lounge music continues)
(staple gun clicks)
(staple gun clicks again)
(laughter)
We're so bad at this.
- We're literally so bad at building stuff.
- It's cause' we were always trying to like,
Quikcrete, 30 minutes.
- Yeah. - It's like yeah, kind of.
- So,
(laughter)
yeah, it's just not ideal,
to be safe pushing into that one direction.
- No.
- How about this, you hold it here?
- Okay. - I have an idea.
Trying to make progress.
- That is pretty wobbly.
- Yeah, if you hold it here,
from coming out this way,
I could figure out how much we need
of cross this.
- [Papi Paul] Do you want a help?
- Do we look like we need help?
(laughs)
- [Papi Paul] Yes!
(simultaneous laughter)
(video bleep noise)
- This took a little longer than we thought,
and we might be a dumber than we thought,
(Jacques laughs) to be honest with you.
We should have planned this out
a little bit stronger,
I'm not a huge fan of the way this wire looks,
- Yeah.
- it's not as sturdy as we really want it to be.
That hog panel is probably better.
For now, what I'm gonna do, the timer's set,
I put it on manual so it won't go up and down
while this is unfinished.
But the sun's gettin' low, it's Winter,
so the sun's gonna set in like 10 minutes,
at 4:40.
(laughs)
So we're gonna come back in a couple days
and see if we can finish it off.
(silly guitar riff plays)
(playful cello music)
- [Kevin as Buttah] Hey Gucci, did you see that
run they were building?
- [Jacques, As Gucci] It's pretty sloppy.
- [Kevin As Buttah] Yeah, I don't know about that wire,
like, I know it's called chicken wire,
but I'm pretty sure I can get through that.
- [Jacques, As Gucci] I think we could do a better job.
(video bleep noise)
- It's been a couple days,
and the camera picked up
a really interesting conversation between
two of the hens that, honestly,
made me feel a little ashamed of the build
that we had been putting together.
So, over the weekend, what I did is I
picked up some hog panel from home depot.
It's a little more pricey,
but it's also way more sturdy,
it's powder coated black, six gauge,
and I attached that right here.
And then what we did is used some of the old
fence panel from the fence in the front yard
that we rebuilt.
This is just recycled fence panel.
So three here, three there,
kind of gives it a little nice accent.
And then the killer feature that we put on
right here are these little fence clips.
It is hands down the best way to attach something
like this, you just have to make sure you
get the right gauge, and it comes with the screws.
And, it's like a seven dollar fix.
So, this part of the run is done,
but, we actually have to put on two gates
back there with Jacques.
So step number one on securing the perimeter
is getting these gates.
Initially we were just gonna do something
really simple, but we decided to stand up
and actual gate structure using the hog panel
with some similar themes, with the one by three
from the fence.
So Jacques, all we have to do is
actually put the latch and hinges on.
- Yep, and it looks pretty good.
- I think it looks pretty sexy if I do say so.
Ah. Ah. Ah. (chomping sounds)
Ah-ah-ah-ah!
She actually legit tried to tear me a-ah!
All right, maybe this isn't,
maybe I'm not building this for you.
(chicken clucks)
- Looks like it's ready to do a test hang.
- Okay, let's do it.
- Do you wanna come on this side
so you can look at the straightness of it?
- I can see it, and I can see that it's not.
(laughter)
I can see that it's not.
It's annoying but we just have to take
a little more of the apron out, right here.
- Yeah.
- That's it. - Okay.
- So I'm just gonna take out
this entire section right here.
- All right, all right, let's do a test.
It's only two screws, but - That's not bad.
It won't swing cause' we gotta
redo the predator, but that's okay.
- Okay.
- So the question is - Should we do a test latch?
- Yeah we should do a test latch.
Cause' I still am a little sus
that we're gonna get to that edge there.
- I've made this exact same mistake,
- Really?
- when I built mine. (laughs)
- And here he is, helping us out,
and somehow the mistake is being made again.
- Oh, is it too far?
- It's too far.
The smarter play here actually is just to
get a latch with a longer thing here,
and not deal with-
Cause' this is set, you know what I mean?
- Yeah.
All right, I'm gonna say that that's gonna work.
- Think so?
- Callin' it.
(simple cheer)
- Almost, it's fine for now though.
- Right, should we hang the other gate?
- Let's hang the other gate.
(screwdriver whirs)
- You guys don't even know what
we're going through to make your lives better,
and you don't even care.
(Jacques laughs)
- [Jacques] They don't respect us.
- They don't respect it, and they'll
never respect it.
They'll never know what we've done.
Is this what childhood and parenting is like?
(Jacques laughs again)
- [Jacques] Slight.
Should we let the chickens test this out?
See if we can find any gaps?
- Yeah.
The moment is here,
I have my Grubblies little snacks here,
the black soldier fly larva.
The hens are inside, let's open the gate
for the first time and let them out.
Come to daddy!
Come on out, girl, there we go.
(chickens pecking at feed)
There goes Lav, there goes Butter.
I can hear that snacking.
Rufio's tentative, tentative.
Well look at that.
- [Jacques] I mean that's just that blend,
there's so many more things we can do over here now.
- The planting we can do here, - [Jacques] Yeah.
- is the crazy part, the planting.
Thought is to have some sort of planter box
surrounding this bottom area here,
at least on this side, not on this side,
you'd block the door.
But something that can grow up and they can
forage through the hog fence on,
which I think would be really, really cool.
And then my girlfriend brought up the idea,
on the backside, of growing something in
like a planter box that hangs down,
that eventually they could munch from.
So we'll see if that works, but,
right now it's just put the latches on.
(upbeat lounge music plays)
(fence latch snaps shut)
(simple cheering)
- [Kevin] They have so much space out here now guys.
They have this whole area,
we're blocking it off here,
there's a gate over here, a gate over there,
I would say we tripled their outdoor space,
and there's so much more to build.
But, I'm actually curious what you think
we should build here.
We could put some protection for hawks,
we could put some planters;
show me something in the comments.
We will build the most up voted comment,
we will put it right here, at the homestead.
I think the hens are liking this.
Until next time my friends,
good luck in the garden,
and keep on growin'.