After about two weeks of planning, and a lot of work over the weekend, our ducks have finally moved downstairs to their "play yard", or "duck house" as I like to call it. Jen is charting the adventures of the ducks here.
Everything came together nicely, and pretty cheap, thanks to some extra fence that family had and Jen's amazing find of a dog house up on Craigslist. We reused some of the fence posts from the yard and it cost me about $45 to put together the two gates (yes, there's a little gate to lock the ducks in safely at night.
While we had debated about exactly where to position the duck yard, we came to the conclusion that under the deck was perfect because it would be more protected during the winter from the snow, there was already a roof and a back wall, which meant less material to purchase, and the space wasn't being used anyway.
The one thing you can't see is that one side of the roof was ripped open and hinges put in so that we can easily get into the house to clean it out and (hopefully) get eggs in the next couple of months. The other thing you may or may not see in the photo is the big galvanized tub that serves as a "duck pond" hiding right behind the green branch in the lower right hand side of the photo.
The ducks love their new space. There's lots more room to run around in, though they spent nearly all of their first afternoon sitting in their pond, floating around and ducking under to clean up. In another week or so we'll let them start exploring the entire back yard.
As always, there's a few minor things to update. There are some slight gaps from the roof to the fence towards the front of the yard where there was a bit of a downward slope. I just need to get a little more fence or lattice work put there to keep extra critters out. There are a slew of nails in the roof from the rain tiles installed, and I need to clip those off.
All in all a very successful project, a lot of hard work, and a lot of fun. I tend to spend my weeks hacking the matrix of 1s and 0s and the weekends hacking lumber, logs, or weeds to seek some balance. 8^D
...oh, and of course no duck entry would be complete without showing the girls and their pets:
