A Roof for the Chickens

My chickens are major wusses.  When it's snowed so far this year they have pretty much refused to leave their coop or the area directly under the coop.  They do not like snow.  I decided to give their enclosed run a roof so that they'd have some snow-free ground to scratch around on.

Here is what their run looked like before:

I bought some clear pvc panels so that snow could not get in but sunlight still would.  We wanted to angle the panels away from the coop so that rain would not be funneled right to the coop so we screwed a few 2X4 scraps to the top of the run.

This was a perilous job because to reach the back of the run against the garage I had to sit on a ladder laid across the top of the run:

I spent a lot of time telling Tim how unsafe I felt.  You can see the feet of the ladder wrapped in plastic shopping bags.

I didn't want to get it all muddy and chicken-poopy because we use this ladder inside.  After attaching the wood we screwed in one piece of the plastic panel.  It is long and thin, so it had to run the length of the run along the garage.  Then we laid the second panel overlapping the first and used our drill to drill pairs of holes through both panel.  I then zip-tied the panels together.

This made one large panel that was 8 feet long and about 4 feet wide.  We then screwed the whole thing into the closer side of the run.  It now looks like this:

It does not go the entire length of the run but it will hopefully leave enough clear ground when it snows that the chickens will leave their coop occasionally.  Of course, I don't blame them for holing up inside.  That's what I mostly do in the winter too!