2 new chicken coops on display and for sale in West Oakland, Calif.

Hey everybody,
Matt and I finished our last two chicken coops for the book, designed and built in Oakland, Calif. Interested in owning a piece of history? Check them out at our friend Maurice's urban chicken farm oasis on Mandela Parkway @ 11th Street, West Oakland.


The Simple Coop features reclaimed redwood siding and a rusty sheet metal shed roof. It is built to accomodate standard home insulation so this coop would do well in an extreme climate, hot or cold.

The Nordic style A-Frame is sleet, snow, hail, and sun resistant.

Each coop's footprint is 4-feet by 4-feet and will house three or four chickens. Priced to move at $750 each, we will deliver within reason in the Bay Area.
Contact us for a site visit.
Thanks for your interest in our work.
Kevin

More Photos from the Shipping Container Coop+Run and Shed Project

What fun it has been to chop in half a 20-foot shipping container with Matt and my cousin, separate the parts Roman-style with Bill from shedmover.com, and build out a chicken coop+run and storage shed with the hard-charging crew from In Good Company. It is nice to be out there on the farm working and talking to the neighbors--all positivity and thumb-ups.

We found some old redwood siding on craigslist and planed it down to look new again. The redwood slab outdoor work table came from Evan Shively in Marshall, Calif. Matt led a team to get the massive redwood+mesh chicken run built. The coop is now occupied.

To the shed we added double barn doors with a custom welded steel California Poppy Orange locking mechanism.

City Slicker Farms is great to work with, they are growing fresh vegetables for everybody in West Oakland. We are happy to help make fresh eggs a reality.

If you have every wanted to chop up a shipping container, I highly recommend it. Or call us! I want to do it again.

More on Rust

Building these shelves for William Stout's new store on Solano required quite a bit of time in the grinding room at the Crucible.  We are truly living our mission statement of using recycled materials whenever possible.  But man, what a job it is to get these old pieces of steel looking bright again.  Gettin' there:

These posts were previously part of the last installation at the old SFMOMA near Civic Center, before the move to 3rd Street in 1995.  Now they announce William Stout's new architecture and design bookstore on Solano Ave in Albany, which opened in September. We are happy to have some pieces in such a fine establishment!

This last photo was taken on install day.  They look better with books, go check them out in person and support your local publisher/bookstore.

Steel Blackening Trials / Rust Appreciation

Who knew it would be so hard to turn steel black?  So many choices, so many chemicals, so many trials:  Gun Blue, Presto Black, Presto Black Gel, Slate Black...all recommended by various folks, all disappointed us in one way or another.  Some gave the steel a rainbow trout sheen, which was cool but not what we were seeking.  Other patinas yielded various shades of brown/silver/black.  All of them highlighted the welds which is what we are trying to blend in the first place.  Without going to the trouble and expense of powder-coating, how does a fabricator get a nice even black on his steel projects?  We have settled on the Presto Black Gel after wire-wheeling the whole thing; sand-blasting the metal actually seems to inhibit the reaction, which surprised me.  Here are photos of two sample pieces before the trials (top image is wire-wheeled and sand-blasted, the second is just wire-wheeled):

The goal is to blend in the weld with the rest of the steel, which has a lot of beautiful texture.  To be honest if it were up to me I would leave the bases outside in the rain for a few weeks and let it rust, then clear coat it.  But the trend these days is for steel fixtures with that blackened, gun metal look.

Our trials have been inconclusive over the past week so we will keep trying today in advance of putting the stools together for the Crucible's art show at the Open House this Saturday.  Here are the same pieces after our patina trials:

I hereby propose a worldwide "rust appreciation" movement WHEREBY we proclaim that rust is beautiful and WHEREBY we realize rust never sleeps and WHEREBY we don't want our fabricators using gross chemical treatments in an attempt to vainly inhibit rust, which is beautiful and never sleeps.

Thank you for reading and we hope to see you at the Crucible on Saturday checking out our stools--