The Chicken Coop (Part One)

 I know she doesn't look like much, but she's got  it where it counts, kid.

I had several criteria that the chicken coop needed to meet so the design really evolved from that.

• It had to use wood that was mostly under 1200mm long.  We were getting all our timber from the firewood pile at the dump so the pickings were OK but only under a certain length as it was mostly offcuts and demolished buildings there.  
• It had to be portable.  We needed to be able to fit all the bits on our trailer to move it when we eventually have to leave here, it also needed to be movable around the yard outside so that we could give the hens fresh grass to nibble and keep them a bit cleaner.
• It had to be easy to maintain.  The whole thing was designed around ease of cleaning as nobody wants to spend longer than they have to scooping up chicken poo.
• It had to be modular and configurable.  We are not sure where we will go next and what we might have to do there so the coop might need to be smaller or go around a corner, I wanted to be ready for that contingency. 

The end result is a bit of a mixed bag in my opinion, I have a few more ideas that I am going to be adding to it soon that will help though.  I have some pictures and a video of me walking you through the whole idea.

All the wood we got from the dump had to be checked for nails and have them removed, I would guess half the usable wood had nails in it and I am very careful not to get nails near my woodworking power tools.  This is just a sample of some of the wood we had to work with.

I started out by making a framework, I wanted it to be wide enough to hold 6 birds on the roost,   I made 3 nesting boxes as I had no idea how many I would need for 6 birds, turned out that just one would have been fine but this is how it started.

The piece of plywood in the front there was cut in half, the other half went on this side of it for the door as you will see later.  I don't have a lot of pictures of the rest of the build as I wasn't planning on documenting it in pictures, I usually work better with video.

Originally the idea was to have mesh in the floor for the birds to walk around on so that their mess would all fall through onto the ground, It didn't work out very well as the birds couldn't work out what to do and got all panicky.  I think it was because they didn't feel safe walking around on it, it was not very solid feeling.  I made a removable floor  but then replaced it with a trapdoor.

In the back of the coop there are 2 rails that serve the dual purpose of being something good to life the coop with and they are also the rails that the nesting boxes slide out on.  Originally I was going to have it so that we had to slide it out to check the nesting boxes but that doesn't work out so well with nosey little hens poking around so I made a hinge for the lid above the nesting boxes that you can see in the video I will post later but not in this picture as it was a later modification.

You can also see in the picture above how the water catchment system works.  It has worked very well all winter, I suspect summer will be a little different though.    You can also see in this picture how the door was just a piece of plywood that I cut and put hinges on, it wasn't quite long enough to cover the side and I have some other wood now that I might use to finish it off properly.  We still have a few litres of paint left, it was all free paint from the dump, they have a paint recycling area there that is just great and free paint is just the right price when you have no budget.

The run was made in squares for a variety of reasons, it needed to be configurable, it needed to be easy to replace parts and made to a standard size so that I all parts were interchangeable.  I ended up getting mostly 100mmx200mm wood so to make it go further I split it all down the middle.  This gave me nice strong wood and heaps of it, I decided that 5 cubes worth of run would be a good start and we could always add to it later.  The cubes are not quite 1m squared, they are just slightly wider than a roll of chicken wire so that I only had to cut the roll off in squares and there was no stretching or adding bits.  

This only left me with the problem of fastening them together.  I made up some model bits from scrap wood and tried a few different ideas but eventually I came up with the nails and holes idea, every piece has 2 nails in the top and bottom, one each side and on the sides it has holes for the nails to go in.  I used 120mm jolt head nails which seemed to work really well, they were hard to bend and just the right length to go right through the wood 

You can see the nail and hole on this corner.  This allows me to make this kind of configuration easily, you can see the nails sticking out on each second top square. they alternate directions and lock together really well.  The door was an old cupboard door we found on the woodpile, Shay wanted to be able to feed the hens for some reason so I had to make her a door.  As it turned out we made them a dining hall at a later stage due to a rat problem we had not anticipated.

This was the stage when we got our first chooks.  We started with 5 and they seemed pretty happy with the place.

Here is a video of just before we got the chooks, the roof hadn't been trimmed or nailed on, most of the squares were not done and the floor had not been replaced but you get the idea.

Cheers.