My thrifty, Cozy, Coop

To give some background first, I've never raised chickens and I never built anything of this magnitude by my self.  I'm handy with my hands but nothing could have prepared me for the year long project I was going to start with this coop.

I decided to go into chickens because my grand mother had chickens all while i was just a kid.  I wasn't really close with her but it was one of the things that really fascinated me when we came up to visit, and it was the first thing you saw driving in the yard.  She always had leghorns.

What also prompted me was this delapitated garden shed that was half collapsed (came with the house and trust me was not the selling point!).  The first year we stored pallets on the cement for our wood stove but during that winter I started to get the itch to build the coop.  Luckily my shed is large enough to where I could build the entire frame inside over the winter.  I built all 4 walls in less than a week and even clamped them together to get an ides of what it was going to be like.  The walls at this point cost me only a box of nails since I found a business that was doing some remodeling.  Anyways when the frost came out I finally was able to move along and get things put together on the site.

Sorry no photos of the construction but if you have any questions just ask and I'll be more than happy to answer them.

It took me a year to build since I really put too much time in getting the details right (in retrospect now that I know I like raising chickens probobly not a bad thing).  Between coming up with highly functional feeders and nest boxes, which I have a new design out for:

http://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=5885849#p5885849

http://www.backyardchickens.com/web/viewblog.php?id=81983

To getting the skylight opening trimmed out and the automatic door closer installed.  That's right I said skylight, reused from my parents bathroom remodeling project!

But enough yammering, here's the rest of the images I have.  Enjoy!!

PAGE UNDER CONSTRUCTION