The Pentagon Takes Shape

“No it won’t,” I told my husband Mike.

“Yes it will,” he insisted.

The issue being debated is the completion date of the Pentagon, the five-sided chicken coop that Mike is building. When the calendar hits November, a race begins to see which reaches the finish line first, December 31st or whatever major project is on the table.

To my way of thinking, progress is slow. If you can’t track it on an Excel spread sheet, it’s not happening.  Mike says progress in construction occurs in baby steps and giant leaps. Putting up the frame, filling in the corners and caulking up cracks are the baby steps. Putting up walls and installing windows are the giant leaps.

One of the rules on our farm, outside of No Mean Animals, is Don’t Throw Anything Away Because The Minute You Do You’ll Wish You Hadn’t. The drawback being, it’s easy for your property to lose curb appeal. The benefit, you can throw together a chicken coop for roughly fifty bucks.

The former owner of our house also believed in the No Throwaway Rule. Mike was rummaging in the garage and found a stash of small windows and a couple of sliding patio windows, making the Pentagon a chicken coop with a picture-window view.  All windows either slide or crank open to keep the interior from becoming a broaster.

The finishing touch is a set of 1960s-era monkey bars that will be joined to the Pentagon by a chicken run made of orange plastic snow fencing. The monkey bars are from the old Kerrick School and are close cousins of the monkey bars from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Our set will be entirely covered with snow fencing during Phase Two of construction.

Our farm has been a diploma mill for foxes earning a Ph.D.: Pilfering Hens Daily. But no more. Whenever the Pentagon will be completed, it'll be "better than new," an expression my Dad used whenever he finished a repair job. He'd be proud of Mike's work. The Pentagon's skeleton has withstood winds of fifty miles an hour. It will be sunny and spacious. Add WiFi and I might commandeer it for a writer's office!