Chicken Coop!

October 4, 2022Macy M4523 views

This spring we got our first animals for the ole homestead: Chickens!

Chickens are a logical first choice. It seems like it would be easy to not get too attached. It SEEMS that way but these feather friends give us so much entertainment that it’s hard NOT to get attached honestly. I certainly have my favorites. We each picked two chickens and added two guinea fowl on the top for tick control. Somehow we got an extra one in for a grand total of 11 birds. We’re down to ten now because one turned out to be a rooster (we actually found him a nice home which was in need of a protector instead of a dinner plate to warm…).

Only four of our eight layers are actually laying and they all lay a different color. We are up to our eyeballs in eggs. We have been supplying the neighbors and ourselves and still can’t get through them fast enough. The kids have aspirations of starting a business next summer. We’ll have to figure that out when we get there.

The coop

The first mission was to build a coop. I’ll preface this by saying 6 months ago I knew absolutely zero about chickens. I took a small fraction of the fence we tore down last spring and designed what I thought would work well. With Miles and Hazel’s assistance we made the darn thing as best as we could entirely out of 6″ fence pickets and 4×4 posts. We had a few other sticks of random lumber laying around and I ended up having to buy 6 hinges. It was an extremely low cost project! We even had leftover insulation and scrap metal laying around for the roof! They are sheltered!

I kept with a small footprint following suggested space allotments for the number of birds we got. The small space will be useful in winter because these cold hearty breeds won’t have heat other than from their bodies! I used a shed roof to eventually add a rainwater catchment system. That’s in the plans for next year because I want to see if it’s even worth doing. We have a shallow well a few yards from the coop so it’s not a big deal to go pump some water. I basically made a 6′ x 3′ box. The last 18″ of the box is a storage closet where we keep spare bedding and food along with some solar components. We have solar in it to power three things: a camera, a switched coop door and heater for winter water.

The main door of the coop is the nesting boxes. In order to clean the coop I can swing the whole door open and reach everything. Otherwise, I made the back of the nesting box door operable, too. So to snatch the eggs we just slip open the back of the door.

The verdict so far

It’s been a solid design. We’ll see how snow plays into that. It’s surely going to get tricky to clean with 12″ of snow to work around. And I’d like to add a window before then. I imagine the girls will be inside a little more in winter, if only because of the short days. It would be nice to have a view out.

Fortunately for them, we’re about to start another project on the tiny house that will include getting rid of one of the little windows. The kids are going to get twin sized beds in their room (who seriously thought we’d still be in the tiny house now!? not me…. ha!). It’s going to be a little project that we planned on doing after we built the deck but it looks like we’re going to knock it out before winter and do the deck next spring if lumber is rational. In that project their window will leave their room so I think I’ll gift it to the chickens! 🙂