A roost of one's own - now available in Muncie

Muncie might not be a major automaker anymore, but we've established a toehold in another key manufacturing domain.

Chicken coops.

Brook Linton, who runs Solid State LLC out of a cavernous 90-year-old warehouse on the city's near south side, recently explained what got him into it.

"Nobody around here was doing it," he said. "Nobody was making chicken coops. A lot of people are getting into chickens again."

Tall and lanky, Linton was bundled against the cold air flowing through his drafty building at 800 S. Liberty St. last week. As he talked, everywhere you looked in its western end were stacks of old doors, tumbled sinks and bath tubs, framed windows reclaimed from walls and felled porch posts waiting to rise again.

All this, he noted, was salvaged from old houses razed over the past couple years.

Can't find an eight-foot door? This is your place.

"All the components of the house, we resell them," Linton said. "A lot of people who can't find anything in the box stores come here."

It was at the far eastern end of the warehouse, though, where employee John Halsey was hard at work, building a new chicken coop from recycled wood.

"We have a pretty set pattern," Linton noted, of his coops' design.

The young businessman launched this part of his enterprise about eight months ago. Halsey was working on the seventh coop, and four have been sold. A couple of the others sat outside the warehouse, looking like big doll houses, their weathered blue and yellow paint schemes determined by the color of the reclaimed wood that went into their manufacture.

"We really don't paint them," Linton said. "Whatever reclaimed color the wood is, that's on the walls."

So, what will a chicken coop cost you?

If you'd like the large coop, one that as many as 25 chickens would be proud to call home, it will be about $1,000.

On the other hand, if you are more of a 10-chicken man (or woman), that will run you only about $550.

The smaller coop, by the way, was specially designed with ease of hauling in mind, Linton said, it being small enough to fit in the bed of a compact S-10 Chevy pickup truck.

Of course, if your chicken ambitions far exceed 10 or even 25 fowl, don't despair.

"We can make bigger coops," Linton said. "It's custom sized."

By the way, each coop contains a roost inside.

"That's because chickens like to sleep up off the ground," Linton explained, just that quickly doubling the scope of this reporter's chicken knowledge.

Who are the folks buying his chicken coops? It's probably too early to have accurately identified a market demographic yet, but he said one customer was a new retiree.

"He just wanted something to do," he said.

More power to folks like that, he continued, and their dreams of raising chickens.

"We're hoping that it catches on," Linton said.