Raising Guineas and Building Shelter

It is a little known fact that Guinea Fowl can be trained. People laugh at me when I tell them that I have my guineas trained to the sound of a dinner bell, then stare at me in disbelief when I demonstrate and 15 flying birds come at them! This was an experiment I created because the purpose of having guineas is to be outside eating ticks and other bugs. With this I had to devise a system where they could be free range during the day, but I could get them into the guinea house at night for protection from predators. So when they were about two months old every time I fed them I would ring a little cow bell. At approximately three months old I released them outside and the very first time I rang that bell they all came running to the feeder! Voila...Pavlov's Dogs works again! This system has really made it easier on me because now I do not have to wait for them to feel like roosting for the night and can put them up whenever it is convenient for me.
Would you believe me if I told you that we built our guinea house for $5.37? If you are willing to do some work and are handy with a few basic carpentry skills, you too can have an almost free guinea or chicken house. How we started is going to some of the local companies who throw away their wooden shipping pallets. If you do some exploring you can find pallets of various shapes and wood types, including hard woods like oak and soft woods like pine. Once you find a bunch the hard work begins. After some trial and error we discovered that the easiest way to dismantle these pallets into usable pieces was to use a reciprocating saw. We cut all of the nails flush with the board instead of trying to pull them out with a hammer.
Once we had dismantled about 20 pallets we separated all of the different sizes. We decided to save one large pallet as the base so it was raised off of the ground and it gave us a quick foundation. My husband quickly constructed 3 walls and attached them. We tried to make them as square as possible, but were not overly picky about it. Then he constructed the 4th wall with a large enough opening for a double dutch door. We had some old hinges for the doors and small pieces of really old metal roofing laying around that we pieced together. Then we cut one hole up high for a window that we covered with an old piece of screen for ventilation. That part of the framing construction went fairly quickly, the part of doing the siding felt like it took forever. Since all we had were tons of slat pieces from the pallets, we decided to do a clapboard type exterior. Ten million staples later (thank goodness we had an air gun) our guinea house was almost complete. The last necessary piece, which cost me $5.37, was the hardware cloth we purchased to staple to the floor. This allowed poop to fall through and kept the snakes out.
Four years later my guinea house is still standing tall and strong. We have made some modifications to it along the way due to adding chickens to the mix, like a nesting box on one side and a fenced paddock on the other.
If I had to do it all again, I might spend the money on a couple of sheets of plywood instead of spending so many hours doing the clapboards. You just have to decide at what point is your time worth more than the money you are saving. Overall, the experience embraced everything I love about farming...the ingenuity, the experimenting, the satisfaction of doing something yourself, and the time spent working hard with my husband as a team. That...as they say....was priceless!