In the 2020 COVID lockdown, with plenty of time on his hands, a builder named Bruce Jones picked up the tools and decided to create something new.
Having spent the last decade milling his own timber for his small wood crafts business, Bruce had no lack of decent wood lying around his property. He got his materials together, took his measurements and – completely making up the design as went along – built a small chicken house with a run.
Bruce and his wife had just adopted six rescue chicks, and the coop was to be a home for the birds. The design worked well, and it did the job. So Bruce built a second one out of the leftover materials to sell online.
Not expecting too much interest, he put the second coop he made on Facebook Marketplace for $1,700. It sold within 40 minutes. Within a day he had orders for five more. And within a week he had fielded hundreds of phone calls from poultry owners keen to get their hands on his impromptu creation. Overnight, a full-time business was born.
“I’m blown away by the level of interest I’ve had,” says Bruce, who has now sold over 150 coops to poultry owners across the North Island. “I had wanted to do this for years, but I never had the time. I was sick of seeing flimsy yet stupidly expensive coops for sale, so I saw a gap in the market. I started with that first coop and it’s just grown from there, I’ve been flat out ever since.”
With more interest came more requests for bespoke designs. Some wanted just the house without the run, so in the second lockdown, after he and his wife Kirsty moved to a 15-acre block in Bombay, Bruce built a “house-only” model called the Deluxe. Others wanted the Deluxe with the run, so Bruce built that as well. Gradually, his prototype design evolved and spawned a range of different models with a variety of features at different price points, opening the door to more customers.
“We’ve got small models that house three to four chickens, and then we’ve got some 6m by 2m beasts, and everything in between. They range in price from about $800 for the small ones, which are the most popular, to $5,000 for the largest.
“They’re all built out of treated pine with colorsteel for the roof, and the design is fully customisable. You can add in nesting boxes, take them out, extend the run – you can do what you like really – it all depends on how many chickens you have and what you need.”
At first Bruce was surprised at the level of interest in his creations. But he soon twigged on to the fact that he had found the right price point – right in the middle of the market. The launch of his business also coincided with a boom in interest in backyard chickens, courtesy of the COVID-19 lockdown and later the great NZ egg shortage. But the most appealing and enduring feature of his coops is the quality of the workmanship, which he’s developed over many years building furniture and wood crafts out of home-milled timber.
“The chicken coops went absolutely nuts last year during the
great egg rush… my phone was constantly ringing.”
Milling It
Bruce’s journey to timber milling began in 2013, when he was driving diggers for a local company and took on a job cutting down 50 pine trees. Unable to find a buyer for the logs, he purchased them from the property owner and trucked them back to his father’s farm in Clevedon. There, he chopped the logs into firewood to sell locally.
The business gradually grew, more logs started coming Bruce’s way via arborists and contractors, and soon Bruce was driving across Auckland doing firewood deliveries every week. But when some wood of a higher quality turned up on this property, Bruce decided to do something different.
“We were given some big beautiful macrocarpa. I chopped up some of it, but then I thought: ‘this is too good’. So I went out and bought myself a small Alaskan Chainsaw Mill and I started milling it to make chopping boards and coffee tables. It just went absolutely mad. We must have sold more than 500 chopping boards since then.”
As Bruce continued to perfect and promote his craft, more business started coming his way. He took one of his tables to the Clevedon A&P show – of which he’s the vice president – and was inundated with interest. Soon he was fulfilling orders from people wanting tables and bench tops for their restaurants, and his pieces found their way into venues in Mt Wellington, the Viaduct and even the Sky Tower.
Word travelled about the wood maestro, and pretty soon Bruce became the man to call in South Auckland if you had some logs to get rid of. Rimu, redwood, eucalyptus, tarairi – tonnes of high quality wood found its way into Bruce’s paddock to dry out and await the blade. He even claimed a huge oak tree that had been removed from a suburban property in Parnell. It was milled and the slabs were sold to a cabinet maker who turned it into bench tops.
But it was on a local site where Bruce struck gold. A contractor overseeing a commercial development at nearby Ardmore had unearthed 150 swamp kauri logs, stumps and root balls. Bruce got wind of it and offered to take the lot, not truly comprehending the mass of material he’d have to wrangle. He took what he could to his property, and contacted the local iwi to see if they wanted any of it. Iwi members came out to bless the wood but decided not to take it, and Bruce was suddenly the sole owner of a colossal volume of precious yet incredibly bulky wood.
“My favourite timber to work with is the swamp kauri,” he says. “It’s difficult to mill, but once you clean it up, building with it is really fun.
“It’s 25,000 years old – you can see evidence of volcanic eruptions in the wood. I make chopping boards and tables out of it, or people can buy the slabs. But all those logs were way too much for me. It would have been three to four years of me doing nothing by milling swamp kauri seven days a week. Luckily I found someone with a bigger mill up in Clevedon who was keen to take most of it off my hands.”
Farm Hands
As a trained builder, Bruce’s skills naturally come in handy on his 15-acre block. But just as valuable is his agricultural experience, which he developed through years of working on farms in different capacities. He grew up on his family farm in Clevedon, and after completing his building apprenticeship and working on commercial CBD developments in Auckland, he moved to the South Island to train in agricultural management at the Southern Institute of Technology’s Telford Campus, and then worked on high country stations doing fencing.
It was when he got back to his family farm in Clevedon that he met his wife, Kirsty, who had trained at Telford a year after Bruce. “Kirsty was looking after the riding school in Clevedon, we started dating and it just went from there.”
Kirsty, who now works at Franklin Vets in nearby Pukekohe, also brings considerable farm experience to the block. She’s in charge of the growing menagerie of animals – two horses, a gaggle of sassy Sebastopol geese which they adopted from Waiheke Island, and 15 Brown Shavers that provide a steady supply of eggs.
“The chickens are all rescues from Franklin animal sa,” says Kirsty. “So many chickens come through there. We once picked up about 90 hens and kept them in our carport, and all the locals came round and picked some up to take home with them.”
“We let our ones free-range for a bit, but they kept pooing on our doorstep. We ended up building a big 50m run with poultry netting from Farmlands to contain them.”
With plenty of pasture, stockyards, a spring-fed pond, and a large covered stable for the horses, the block is well set up to run livestock. The bottom valley of the property was once the site of a trotting track. Keen to produce much of their own food, Bruce and Kirsty kept some sheep and a herd of beefies the year before, but some serious pugging and fence escapees persuaded them to take a break from the ruminants and devote their energy to the chicken coop business.
“The chickens coops went absolutely nuts last year during the great egg rush,” says Bruce. “My phone was constantly ringing. I must have had 500 calls in one week from up north to the deep south. I closed the book at 40 orders and we’re still working through the last of those.”
Bruce’s coops end up in as many urban backyards as rural lifestyle blocks, and he’s delivered coops as far away as Hawke’s Bay. For South Island customers, Bruce offers to deliver the coops as far as Wellington before handing them over to the new owners to get them across the Cook Straight.
It’s not just poultry owners who are interested either – one Takapuna-based woman who owns and breeds guinea pigs tracked Bruce down and commissioned him to build a new house for her cuddly Cavia.
Yet the most satisfying orders to fulfil are those from schools. Bruce says he’s had a few orders from teachers and principals keen to introduce their students to the realities and joys of keeping poultry and growing their own food.
“I built a coop for a school in Mangakino,” says Bruce. “They wanted to teach the kids about the whole paddock-to-table thing – raising the chickens, looking after them, and collecting the eggs. I think they painted it bright pink. I’ve got another big one going to Whangarei Girls High School in a few weeks. I never thought I’d get schools buying from me, but here we are.”
Despite the price and supply of eggs easing significantly in the past year, Bruce says he’s not seeing a slow down in enquiries and interest. In fact, he’s taking a year off from the firewood business to keep up with the coop demand. His plans to streamline the business include building a website with a tool that people can use to design their own coops when placing their orders.
Because his coops are designed for outdoor use, he currently builds them out of treated pine that he has to buy in. To get around this, he intends to engage a local treatment plant to treat his own, home-milled pine, creating a self-sufficient system with the bulk of the materials manufactured on site.
“That’s the goal,” he says. “There are so many pine forests around here that people want to get rid of. We could go in there and take 500m3 of timber – how many coops wood that make!?
“People love their chickens – they want to take care of them and give them a good life.
“That suits me fine!”
Run of the mill
Much like everything Bruce does, he learned how to mill wood by watching YouTube and reading online forums. He describes the process of milling as “very rewarding,” as every single slab he cuts is different than the one before. Still, it can be cumbersome work, and he follows a precise method to ensure the milling goes as smoothly as possible.
His basic rules are:
- Make sure both the log and the mill are level and on a stable surface.
- Ensure the saw blade is as sharp as possible.
- Wear safety equipment including safety glasses, gloves, ear protection, boots and a hardhat.
- Make sure your mill and chainsaw is the correct length for the log you want to cut.
- Take your time.
The process
With the Alaskan Chainsaw Mill that Bruce uses, a 127 horsepower chainsaw is mounted into a metal jig system, allowing him to run the mill along the length of a log, cutting – or filleting – slabs at the desired thickness.
Both Bruce’s mill and chainsaw are designed to cut slabs up to 1.5 metres wide. “That’s one of the joys of having a big mill – everyone wants you to chop up their logs.”
To set up, Bruce will winch a log and place it on a level, stable surface. Many millers will do this by rolling a log up a ramp to straddle two workhorses. Once the log is in position, Bruce places a metal rail guide along the length of the log, securing it level with a screw system.
The mill is placed at the end of the log on top of the rail guide, with the chainsaw bar suspended below to cut through the wood. The whole contraption is then slowly pushed along the length of the log, with the rail guide removed and reattached after each slab is cut.
The time taken depends on the wood, the length of the log and the power of the chainsaw, but it usually takes Bruce around 15 minutes, and he cuts his slabs to around 80mm thickness.
After the logs are filleted, Bruce will strap the slabs together tightly to prevent warping.
Who: Bruce and Kirsty Jones
Where: Bombay, South Auckland
What: Wood crafts and firewood business
Land: 15 acres
Insta: @crackling_wood_works