It’s been a while since I posted about using freecycle to obtain materials to build my duck house. I figured I’d share some of the pictures of the house we built. Here’s a picture of my wonderful brother-in-law, Anthony, building our duck house. Actually, he is installing the locks on the modified doghouse that I picked up from freecycle. The red doghouse measures about 2.5 feet by 3 feet. The larger connected structure was built by Anthony (with a tiny bit of Arp’s assistance) from both re-used lumber and new lumber. That part of the structure measures 3 X 5 X 5. I spent less than $50 on wood – Anthony wanted to be sure that we used pressure treated wood for the floor and bottom framing because it is in contact with cinder blocks, which are porous.

For the doghouse, Anthony basically just installed a new lockable door on the outside, and cut a hole on the inside so the ducks can walk back and forth between the structures.

Here you can see, from the inside, how the old doghouse and the new structure connect. I just hope the runner ducks don’t get a neck ache from ducking down through the opening! They are kind of tall, but everything I’ve read says you don’t need a very big opening for doors that ducks will walk through.

And here is the house after I painted it and installed hardware cloth over the soffits and the window. I used 1/2 inch welded hardware cloth so that raccoons can’t get in and kill my ducks. The soffits in the front and back of the house will help to ventilate the house, although I might have to close some of them up in severely cold weather. I plan to paint the doghouse part also, but I ran out of time the other day. I also plan to insulated the walls of the house sometime over the summer so that the ducks are well-protected from the cold by the time winter is here.