Drum roll, please...

When I first bought my house, I noticed a pattern arise. Every time I gave someone a tour, I would say things like this, "And this is the kitchen, but I'm going to take this out, I'm going to paint this, I'm going to put in a new _________, this isn't going to stay like this," and on I'd go describing my vision to my guest. It was as if I wanted them to see the place as I could see it in my mind, to see all the potential it held. In my ideal world, nobody would have seen it until I had made my vision into a reality. But then, as I settled into home ownership, I realized that the house will never be finished – there will always be projects and things that can be revamped, improved, or redone.

So, when we started working on the chicken coop, I recognized this perfectionistic, visionary attitude as it began to creep in again. I really didn't want to post any pictures until our masterpiece was complete. But after months of hard work and many requests, I'm giving in. Now for my classic spiel...it's not completely done yet. We still need to put trim on all the doors, which will be in the contrasting light green color, put a door on the storage cabinet, redo the run door, which will also be light green, and adorn the hen house doors with super cute rusty house numbers. But I have to concede that it is looking pretty amazing and it's about time for it to shine in a post.

Words cannot express how proud I am of my amazing boyfriend. I realize that my coop could have been way more bare bones than it is and the girls probably would have been perfectly happy, but he spent hours engineering and crafting the coop to be just the way I hoped it would be. We have learned that we're horrible estimators of time – turns out we have no context for knowing things like how long it will actually take to install a drainage system and prepare a roof for planting. We have put months (literally months – almost three and a half months to be exact, from planning to almost-completion) of blood (yes, blood has actually been shed – two words: hardware cloth), sweat, and thankfully, no tears. So here it is, our coop in all its glory, almost finished! I'll share more photos of the finished coop and a detailed post about our green roof soon!