There are two kinds of men: those who just buy the new thing their wife wants, and those who volunteer and overpromise a masterfully crafted and cheaper alternative to the product at hand. 

My wife is pretty awesome, because she doesn’t go looking to spend money in most cases and always has the family or farm in mind when she does. She also has a very optimistic and supportive opinion of my building skills. Occasionally she overestimates my abilities, but it’s good to have a fan.

Last spring, we began discussing how to improve our chicken house setup to save ourselves some effort as well as keep the chickens healthier and the eggs cleaner. The culmination of these discussions was the idea that we were going to restructure the roosts in their houses to make cleaning them easier and also give them rollout nestboxes to protect their eggs and limit how dirty they could make the boxes they used. We had found a company online called Hengear, which made a pretty good-looking rollout box according to our needs. It wasn’t terribly overpriced, assuming it worked as well as advertised. 

The only trouble was that the slant of the roof made it not fit very well with the position of the roosts. We wanted to put the box along the back wall, but due to height, the roof cut into where the box would have to go. 

Being the natural problem solver and do-it-yourselfer that I am, I proudly volunteered my services to design and construct a nestbox from recycled wood we had on hand; it would fit into the slant of the rear-wall roof. 

As we always wanted to save money, and seeing it as a better fit anyhow, we agreed to pursue this option for one of the two buildings and see how well it worked. 

I spent a few days measuring, demolishing and constructing the new box, and eventually ended up with a pretty good box. Was it perfect?  No. But it did keep some of the eggs cleaner and opened up the space in the building for cleaning, so it was a step in the right direction.

As I mentioned, however, the time it took to build this box was several days. There were a lot of angles involved, both with making it fit the space and making it function to roll the eggs forward while allowing the chickens enough comfort to lay them and not fall forward out of the box themselves. 

Overall I was pretty proud of the end product, but it wasn’t worth the time it took to get it right. We went all summer with this box installed and the chickens have used it, but not without some resistance. 

As we approach the winter, the cleaning situation still has not been ideal in the other henhouse, so we decided it was time to take care of that one too. This time, however, it was a much faster and less laborious decision to simply order the box from Hengear.

Upon arrival, it took me and the boys roughly an hour in the garage to put the box together, and perhaps half the next day, between me and my wife, to clean and hang the box. 

In terms of time, it was far faster and more efficient, which is worth the investment for me. In terms of quality, so far I have no complaints. We will see how it holds up over time. 

The way out here it can be equally advantageous to build things as it is to buy things. What the wife will be happy with is an important factor when considering options. Time, money and functionality are secondary to that but also important.