I just put another panel up on our chicken tractor; we built in in 2021 and the chipboard sides to the coop were so soft I was able to pull one panel right off the screws. I squoze in replacing the side that has a flap for access to restraw/clean inside a week ago, and got the other side buttoned up today, which means all we have left is the back wall and its laying box and the paneling will be pretty much fully replaced[1]
With all the extra hardware cloth and care we've given it over the last couple years it's a nice little ship of theseus, which is excellent--caring for something long enough to have outright replaced it piece by piece is honestly the dream. Caring for and repairing things is a holy experience, I think. It's good to take something and love it and tend it and see it change and develop to better fit your and its roles[2]
this is back in 2022; I always look at this and think (and took it because) of a Gary Larson comic about chickens in the mist
there is the inner wall that has the doorway out to the yard, but that's fully enclosed in chicken wire/hardware cloth and also seems in much better condition for now. That's gonna be hard to replace now that the frame is so well fenced. ↩︎
which: in this case meant adding a little extra thickness to the frame so I could actually use the short side of the plywood--I had framed it thinking "48 inch gap for plywood" and uh. put them exactly 48 apart instead of making sure the outsides of the 2x4 frame were 48" apart so I could actually attach the plywood to them 🤷 ↩︎