The Quest for the Mouse-proof Chicken Coop: Chapter 5

Another feature that I wanted to ad to this coop was electricity. My old coop had none. I got really tired of going out before dawn every morning in the winter to retrieve frozen water fonts and fill them with warm water. Finally I jury rigged a homemade water heater from a wooden box and a 4o watt light bulb and added a trouble light on a timer to give the ladies a little more light during the short days. I had to cut a hole in the door to run an extension cord in and of course the mice liked all this too. They hid in the box, chewed on the electrical cords and generally made themselves annoying. I wanted to include built in electric with this coop so I installed outlet boxes connected with metal conduit to run electrical before I covered the frame.

Once I had the frames build I was ready to start applying the aluminum flashing to the sides and things really began to be complicated. The first problem was how to cut the flashing. Tin snips were one possibility but they tend to make the edges a bit rough. I finally found a hint on a web site that suggested scoring the flashing with a utility knife and the bending it on the scoring until it broke. This worked beautifully. I found that a linoleum knife, a straight edge and a pair of gloves was about all I needed to cut it clean and straight. I would score the flashing with the knife several times and then bend it on the score a few times to break it.



This even worked when I needed to cut holes in the flashing for vents. I still needed the tin snips for small cuts.
The biggest problem was that the flashing was 20" wide. The walls were about 24" x 48". This meant that every wall had to be pieced together from at least two pieces of flashing on both the inside and the outside. Each piece had to be measured and cut and fitted. This took about four times as long as it looked like on paper.
The other problem was bending the flashing around the sides of the frame. I tried scoring it but that weakened it and caused it to break. I finally came up with the idea of using a piece of angle iron and a rubber mallet to pound the edges around the frame.
Everywhere that the flashing is pieced it needed to be caulked and nailed. I put a bead of silicon caulking under each seam, drilled pilot holes, and nailed the seams closed with aluminum nails every few inches. In spite of all the hassel of measuring and fitting all the pieces together working with aluminum was a lot easier than I had expected. It just took loads more time than I thought it would.

(To be continued)