The last few weeks have marked the end of an era—the scattering of 32 Cottage St #2 to the four winds. The co-op, started in the thick of the pandemic days, will now live on in friendships, memories, and latent Team House WhatsApp group chats.
Okay, four of the six most recent human residents still live within a twenty-minute walk of one another along Orange St in New Haven, and the other two are hardly a twenty-minute drive down I-95. But even for humans, adaptable as we are, new living arrangements require adjustment—I currently have three mattresses stacked in my living room, for example.
32 Cottage Street’s smaller residents especially needed some care as they adjusted to moving out.
Matt adopted the quail (henceforth referred to by their nom de plumage, Brendan) in the spring of 2023 and they quickly became 32’s most beloved residents. Their wellbeing being a central concern during the process of moving house, he and Charlotte looked for a suitable residence and miraculously found a pleasant apartment, conveniently located a couple blocks away on a pleasant street—with an existing chicken coop in the backyard. Co-op to coop indeed.
Quail adapting to chicken infrastructure is probably more straightforward than the other way around, but the coop had not seen much love in a while and would some sprucing (cedaring…) up to keep out the riffraff. The smaller size of the prey also seemed to invite a smaller size of predators, so a greater degree of care plugging holes and a less permeable gauge of fencing seemed necessary as well.
Working at a mill, one tends to collect knotty or sub-thickness flitches and live-edge offcuts. They just kind of follow you home like the mud stuck to your boot. My own new living arrangement lacks storage for large pieces of green wood, however, so rehoming the collection in the yard on Cottage St has been a major task during the move out. This project presented itself as a prime opportunity—authorized, locally-harvested lumber preventing the unauthorized harvest of local quail.
The project came together quickly, thanks to the battery-operated circular saw from MakeHaven’s Lending Library and the inauguration of my new-to-me power planer (cutter blades pre-chipped!). The white oak door pieces were already straightedged on one side, so I just crosscut them to the door width (plus a bit of an overhang to catch the frame) and beveled the edges. I attached them with the formerly saggy door propped into position and then stepped back to admire its squareness.
To hang the additional chicken wire, we used two pieces spanning the front of the enclosure and stapled it to the back. I ripped a cedar flitch in half and used the planer to straighten the cut, thin the pieces a bit, and bevel the back edge. Attached with a bracket to the inside of the coop it sandwiches the chicken wire nicely to secure it.
Like the rest of us, the Brendans can now enjoy their new home without the imminent threat of being eaten by passing wildlife.
