Cranky Puppy Farm: Removing Roadblocks

Welcome to Cranky Puppy Farm!

This blog belongs to two Gen X-er's smackdab in downtown Kansas City where we've been renovating and decorating two old Victorians built in the 1890's. Our life is filled with 3 demanding Pomeranians (1 of them cranky, of course), honking cars, noisy neighbors and the hustle and bustle of city life but we dream of the day when we can move to our 40-acre farm and hear nothing but the wind and the cows next door. Until then, we're chronicling our triumphs and mishaps here as we try to garden and preserve on 2 city lots, raise chickens, and learn all those things we should have learned from our grandparents. Welcome to our world - we hope you'll stay awhile!

Removing Roadblocks

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

The last of the physical roadblocks was moved out of the way today!

When we build the chicken coop several years ago, we were at least smart enough to build it on two 4x4 skids so that it would be easier to move it. It's sitting squarely where the solar array needs to go, so it needed to move a good 25 to 30 feet sideways and around an existing shed.

Our original plan for moving it was to lift it and use several PVC pipes underneath the skids to roll it across the yard. The coop weighs about 1500 pounds but, believe it or not, this does work! Just check YouTube for "move shed" and you'll see several people demonstrating how easy it is. The problem, however, is that the ground underneath the coop isn't level, so we had to use concrete piers and a series of short stubs of 4x4 to level it and then we piled dirt all around to keep critters from getting underneath. For our pipe-rolling to work, we would have had to do quite a bit of digging AND get the coop down off those piers.

Not only are we under a deadline with the whole solar thing, but I haven't mentioned another project that we're working on here: renovating the laundry room. Our time is at a premium right now, so I suggested we call and see if someone could move it for us.

Who knew that tow companies provide this service? Just backup the rollback, slide it underneath and get it up level, drive to where you want it and drop it. The driver put it perfectly where we wanted with no damage to the coop and it didn't take all that long.

The coop in its final resting spot.

Best $125 I ever spent, if you ask me. I know our backs are happy about not having to do all that digging. We still need to level the coop and move the 10x10 chainlink pen over there, but that's easily do-able by hand.

By the way, the feathered residents of this coop were totally confused about where their house went and were pretty distressed about not being able to find their roost. We had to carry them into the coop tonight. Poor babies!