Chicken coop

On Saturday I had a number of friends come and help me start building the coop. It was wonderful to have all those extra hands (and company!). We were able to cut nearly all of the pieces of the coop. Other than two 1x2s I had to buy at the end at Home Depot, all the rest of the wood and the roof pieces were purchased second hand at Urban Ore. This saved me a lot of money and was more eco-friendly, however the downside was that some of the coop walls had to be pieces together from multiple smaller pieces of wood. But we made it work, and it's totally sturdy now that it's all put together!

This is the view as you come down the hill toward the coop. The chicken door and the nest box access window are dark red.

Here's the back of the nesting boxes.

Moving to the left side of the coop, there's a window covered with half-inch hardware cloth for safety. The fact that the roof is corrugated plastic and isn't flush with the top of the coop also adds extra ventilation.

Most of this wall opens up as a large door so that I can climb inside for cleaning. The bottom lip is one foot tall in case of deep bedding, although that's probably excessive.

The view inside the big door. Right now it won't open farther because the PVC is in the way, but I'll adjust that so that it can be wide open. The PVC structure is forming the outside of the run, and will be covered with a combination of hardware cloth toward the bottom and chicken wire above that.

Looking toward the left are the nesting boxes, level with the second roosting bar, and with a wide walkway in front.

Toward the right are the three roosting bars.

The only big mistake I made between designing and building was that when I calculated the measurements for the nesting boxes, I put them flush against the back wall without accounting for the corner stud. Because of that, the box is a few inches away from the wall, it doesn't line up perfectly with the window, and I had to wedge and extra piece of wood between the wall and the 2x4 that holds up the front of the boxes. Oh well, it works.

The thing that didn't work out was that I had planned to turn the little space above the nesting boxes into a shelf that was walled off from the inside and accessed via the nest box window on the outside. However due to the way that was all pieces together from multiple pieces of wood, we couldn't make the window tall enough - as you can see above, it stops right at the top of the boxes. I will probably put in chicken wire to keep the chickens from roosting on that shelf, and rig it up so that I can pull the wire back and use it as an indoor shelf.

I give this coop a B+ (in the category of "regular coop, not a super-coop"). Not bad for a first try, and building it by hand (with help!) brought me immense joy.