Lessons in How Not to Build A Chicken Coop

This spring, as we worked on "yet another chicken coop," I commented to Brian that we build chicken coops a lot. Maybe even every year. So that got me to thinking about how many different coops we have built, which lead me to dub the latest coop, 6.0. I think we have built at least 6. So take a walk down memory lane with me...well it won't really be memories for you, but humor me. Here are some pictures and descriptions of what we've tried and what we've learned. Who knows, maybe this will save some poor soul from making some of the same mistakes we have!

We have lived here since December of 2005 and got our first chickens the spring of 2006. We built our first chicken coop memorial day weekend, 2006.

A pole shed with framed in floor and slanted roof.

Board and batten siding.

Complete with an exercise yard and a pulley operated chicken door that allowed us to keep the chickens safely inside at night.

Our first batch of chicks arrived in early June.

View of the nest boxes from the inside.

Nest boxes from the outside, where we could simply raise this lid and gather eggs without going in the coop.

It was a good coop design and is still standing, but it is empty now. We started our first 25 layer chicks, Buff Orpingtons, in this coop, but it was designed for 6 to 8 adult chickens. We had purchased a straight run of chicks planning to butcher all the roosters and keep a handful of hens. And we did, but we have never had fewer than 15 chickens since that first fateful June day...

First lesson: ALWAYS build it bigger than you think you will need.

Another thing about this coop is that it seems to be accessible to weasels. We got free rare breed chicks with every batch of broiler chicks we raised in 2009. Oddly enough, they almost all turned out to be roosters. At one point we had 6 or 8 roosters with our laying hens and it was crazy. Roosters chasing hens all day, pecking at each other, pecking at the hens. We had hens with no saddle feathers. It was bad. So, I moved all of the roosters to Coop 1.0, thinking it would make a nice bachelor pad. For the most part they seemed to get along when there were no girls around to impress or harass. But then roosters started disappearing. After a couple of nights of losses, I thought I would lock them up extra tight and close up all the doors. (We hadn't been worry too much about it because they were roosting on top of the coop, not inside.) Well, I managed to get them all in the coop and thought I was doing so good. In the morning, I found 6 dead roosters in the coop. Blood everywhere. All the roosters were untouched except their heads were missing. It was gross, and so depressing because I had locked them in there thinking I was protecting them. In reality I just made it harder for them to get away. So we haven't had chickens in there since that incident.

After the chicks were feathered out and starting to get crowded, we moved most of them to Chicken Coop 2.0, which was our first attempt at a mobile coop designed to be moved around the pasture.

Chicken Coop 2.0: our first real experiment with cattle panel construction, and we've never looked back from that either.

This coop was a challenge. It had 4x4 skids on each side, tied together with 2x4s on the front and back. Two 16-foot cattle panels were stapled to the 4x4s,bent to form the roof, and covered with a tarp. We used plastic chicken netting wrapped around a frame made from black plastic water line pipe to make an enclosed front. Pieces of metal fence posts served as anchors for the pipe/door frame. At the back, we used a staple gun and zip ties to attach plastic netting to the braces and the cattle panels. On one hand, this design was lightweight and tall enough in the center that a person could stand upright, so that was nice. However, the weight, height and lack of braces made it pretty susceptible to being blown around by the wind. We only braced one end in an attempt to make it easier to get into, but in hindsight, it was not enough. We also tried hanging the waterer from the top; that worked fine as long as there was no water in the waterer, but once it was filled with 5 gallons of water, it pulled the top of the hut down quite a bit. It also never hung level; we have zero flat ground, so that was kind of a problem. In December of 2006 we put most of our chickens in the freezer and the hens hung out in Coop 1.0.

Lesson 2: Lightweight and tall are good, but not at the expense of stability.

I don't remember this coop having a catastrophic failure, but I know we took it apart and reused most of the pieces in a future project.

We did not build any new chicken housing in 2007, but we did put together a 4x8 foot plywood calf hutch to be used for a pair of milk goat kids (Hansel and Gretel).

By late 2008 we had decided to ramp up our egg and broiler production. We had a little overlap between our old Buff hens and the new batch of Rhode Island Reds and a batch of broiler chicks to fill our freezers. So the Goat Haus temporarily became home to some chicks and continued to be used as such through several batches of broiler chicks in 2009.

The Goat Haus re-purposed as a starter house. Worked okay in the fall and winter, but it was not well ventilated enough for summer use and was not easy to clean out.

 In October of 2008 we started on Chicken Coop 3.0, which was another "permanent" building in the sense that it was not intended to be moved around the pasture. Again, we used full-length cattle panels for the roof and 2x6s for the bottom frame.

Our coop used four cattle panels.

We butted the panels up close to each other and secured them to the 2x6s with a u-bolt attached to a spike driven in the ground on the outside of the coop.

Zip ties were added to keep the panels lined up and add some stability.

The finished Coop 3.0, complete with an end wall of nest boxes with outside access and a cover of plastic sheeting secured with furring strips that are bolted together.

We also built a front frame with a door.

View of the back wall from the inside of the coop.

The chickens on move-in day, early spring 2009.

This coop has been great and we still use it several months out of the year. We consider it the layers' winter housing and have also used it to start several batches of broiler chicks. It works great because the hens have a dedicated space where it does not matter if they tear up the grass during the winter, and it is easier to provide water in freezing temperatures when the coop is close to the house.

Lessons: End walls really make a difference in the stability of taller structures. We have not had any trouble with the wind or snow damaging this coop. A similar design used as a high tunnel for vegetables, but with no end walls, collapsed under a heavy wet snow in the very snowy winter of 2010-11. Also, the furring strips are very helpful for keeping the plastic cover in place and limiting the tearing of said plastic. I think we added them after seeing how much the plastic billowed.

Last summer we had broilers in this coop a couple of different times. We learned that it was too hot for them in the summer time, and made one important modification.

Coop 3.1, with the addition of a hatch on the back end wall that can be opened to allow air movement at the level of the birds. Very helpful in the heat of summer.

From the beginning, we had planned for Coop 3.0 to be seasonal housing. We wanted to get the chickens out on pasture to help fertilize the fields and eat bugs and we knew that letting the coop rest several months a year would help to control any disease in the flock. So, even as we were building Coop 3.0, number 4.0 was already in the planning stages.

But, that had to wait. In 2009 we started selling broiler chickens to a local restaurant. We got a new batch of 25 chickens every 2 weeks and killed 12 to 13 chickens every weekend. With these chicks showing up so often and overlapping throughout their time here, we needed more space and we needed it quickly. So we built three ultra-portable chicken huts in January of 2009. The first one was built with materials scavenged from Coop 2.0.

We again used cattle panels, but this time we cut the panels in half before attaching them to 4x4 skids. The result was a much shorter, much more stable Chicken Coop 4.0 (a.k.a. the huts). We used the exact same principles as the original pasture coop, but the shorter height and narrower width allowed us to get by with no braces. Originally, we planned to put the three huts side by side in a circle of electric poultry netting. We had some challenges with that as lambs liked to get tangled up in the chicken netting and because the holes are smaller, they could not get out. We also had some issues with crows or maybe ravens attacking the chicks in the field. So, we built end caps for the huts that kept the good birds in and the bad birds out. Although I saw the crows sitting on top of the tarp, tearing at it, trying to get in one afternoon. 2009 was a long year...

Anyway, the short height of these huts meant that we had to crawl inside to grab the feeders and waterers twice a day and the birds at butchering time. That was not easy on the back!

Lessons: Very portable and easy to move twice a day. Small size meant chicks were somewhat crowded, but we had 25 birds in these for 6 weeks and then 12 birds for one more week. Short height was hard on our backs. Also, the 2x4s on the ends of these huts were placed well for limiting the amount of drag in tall grass, but the young chicks crawled right out under them and got out into crow country too easily. We later put chicken wire stops on them that helped, but then we were always tripping over the wire edges. Still I think these would work just fine for a small number of chicks. We still have all three, but haven't used them for chicks in a couple of years. This fall they may get re-purposed to help extend our growing season for lettuce and other cool season veggies.

Chicken Coop 4.0, simple and inexpensive.

After surviving 2009 we did manage to build the laying hens their mobile chicken coop in the Spring of 2010. We consider this one of our best projects to date, and I've posted other pictures of this coop before. This is the current housing for our layers 7 to 9 months out of the year, depending on the weather. We've had as many as 28 hens in this coop, which is built on running gear from an old wagon. We basically rebuilt the winter coop, but on a wagon frame instead of on the ground. We added a slatted floor, kept the nest box design and plastic sheeting cover, and found a new material that has worked out great. The plastic netting we had used the past was flimsy and broke down pretty quickly in sunlight.We discovered this vinyl lattice at Lowes and really like its durability and ease of use. It provides plenty of ventilation and protection from large predators.

The latest modification to Coop 5.0 was the addition of automatic water this summer. I took the water bowl we had hooked up to a drum last summer and simply hooked it directly to a hose. We always had to have a hose at the coop in order to fill up the drum, so I just cut out the middle man. Now the hose can be quickly disconnected from the bowl and moved right along with the wagon. Then we just hook the hose back up, and voila, clean, fresh water that doesn't run out.

So that brings us to Spring of 2012 and the construction of yet another chicken coop. I wasn't exaggerating, we've really built six different coop designs, and if you count that we made three of the one design, this was actually our 8th chicken coop in 7 years of chicken ownership. Off the top of my head, I'd say that has been somewhere around 400 to 450 chickens.

We tried to apply the lessons we've learned and hopefully we ended up with a broiler coop that will be as useful as our layer coops are.

Still cattle panel construction, but this time we used all 2x4s for the skids and added corner braces.

We also built considerably stronger front and back supports, more like Coop 3.0, which makes it heavier, but it is still possible for one person to move it around the pasture.

Framing

The finished Coop 6.0. We added four wheels to help move the heavy coop around. The wheels are essential for older birds that have to be moved daily or twice daily. But as we've learned the hard way, the wheels have to come off if this is to be used as a starter house. It hadn't come when I took this picture, but we also added a shade cloth to the older designs, which really seems to help keep the birds cooler when the coop is not under the shade of trees.

Lessons: In previous posts I have detailed the modifications required to use this coop as a starter house. It worked great as first designed with birds 3 weeks old or older. But if we start chicks in it again, we will definitely be taking off the wheels. Between the rebuilding required after the derecho, the starter house modifications, and the addition of an automatic water bowl, I'd say we're now on version 6.1.

Here's hoping we are done building chicken coops for a little while!