I'm a bit late coming to this, I've been off site a bit this week.
Mstang, you said, "Mom also wants to know how your eggs turn out if you boil them when the chicks start laying. She could never get them peeled when she would boil hers."
Tell your mother that the problem is she was boiling eggs that are too fresh. To peel them easily they need to be at least a week old. Otherwise the shell clings to the albumen layer and rips huge chunks out of it. The best way to eat really fresh eggs is to fry them or poach them; the white clings to itself really well, the protein structure is really well connected when the egg is fresh. As the egg ages, the egg white gets looser and more liquid. If you break a really fresh egg (preferably at least an hour after being laid) then you should see only a little runny white, the rest of it is mounded high with the yolk sitting high on top almost dead centre. As the egg gets older, when cracked open the yolk isn't so high, more of it is liquid at the edge and the yolk is slipped to one side a it more. After a week or more, the white is runny everywhere and the yolk just ends up wherever. The membrane around the yolk also gets weaker with age so separating an old egg risks breaking the yolks more easily.
We keep a pencil next to the egg crate inside, so when we bring eggs in we write the date on them. That way we choose the eggs to use according to their age and what we want to do. if we want to fry or poach an egg, we use the freshest. If we want to boil eggs for peeling (or even for eating out of the shell - the flavour is OK unless it's REALLY too old) then we use the oldest eggs. Also, don't boil or poach eggs in an aluminium saucepan, the sulfur compounds will leave a dark ring around the saucepan unless you add vinegar to the water. A splash of vinegar is a good idea anyway, it helps keep the egg from spreading everywhere if the shell cracks.
gcvmom, some advice about a perch - find a non-toxic branch from whatever tree you have and use tat if you can. We just cut a windfall eucalypt branch to the right length and wedged it in. The rough bark, the varying thickness all means that the birds get choice as to how tightly they have to grip and where to stand. It's healthier for them to have something variable. You also can find if you put in multiple perches at different heights, that the chooks that perch higher are the dominant ones. Sometimes it's good to have different heights and sometimes it's not, it all depends on the personalities you have in the shed.
We have deep litter as a base, open to the earth so the earthworms can get in. It's a mound about 3' thick (that's three FEET) of mostly grass clippings and whatever vegetable scraps we know they like. I harvested a cauliflower and after cutting the vegetable itself I uprooted the rest of the plant and just tossed it to the chookhouse. When I looked in next day, they'd eaten everything except the mid-rib of the largest leaves, and the main stalk. I think it's all gone by now. We only have about 6 and they're all geriatric, including one who can no longer walk. She still seems happy enough to hobble as long as we put her near the water bowls and I throw her the occasional snail for a treat.
We let our chooks out during the day and shut them in after they put themselves to bed at night. I also dig out the deep litter occasionally (you DO have to try to keep the rain out of it, or it smells) and use it in the garden. It's like odourless Dynamic Lifter. If it gets wet, boggy or smelly I put garden lime in it and fork it through. The compost heap they live on keeps them warm in winter and also gives them some scratching to do, for dropped bits and earthworms.
I also dry out the egg shells and feed them back to the chooks. when they're dried out (usually in residual heat in the oven) I crush them up fine. It also helps to even out the pH of the deep litter/compost floor.
Your clothes basket sounds like a brilliant idea for a chick creep.
Do you have a dust bath for them? It's like a mini sandbox, not for pooping in but for fluffing the dust under their feathers for a treat. Watching your chooks dust-bathe or sunbathe is lovely. Unless they're doing it in the garden bed where you've just planted your annuals!
Enjoy!
Marg