Ohiochkmom's Chicken Coop

Chicken Condo 

We started building our chicken condo in April of 2009. We were receiving eight chickens for Easter for our three children. My DH wanted to do it "right". So following are photos of our work in progress. Enjoy! I spent many hours perusing this site for ideas and combined alot of what I saw into this "chicken condo". Thank you Backyard Chicken Builders! I didn't have an exact detailed drawing. I scribbled my ideas on some paper and my DH figured the rest out. I am the designer and he is the craftsman. Thank goodness for that. Of course, all painting is done by me. He has NO patience for that.

Since we didn't have a structured plan, we didn't write anything down. So from the best "guess"stimate of my DH, the following dimensions for this Chicken Condo is 10' x 6'. The nest box is about 12" wide x 12" deep, and 14" tall. The enclosed part of the coop is 6' x 3'. When the weather gets better, we'll go up and take more accurate measurements. I hope the following photos help though.

Below is the basic frame structure of the chicken condo. The next photo shows the chicken wire we placed around the entire coop. We also left about an inch of wire hang off the bottom and we placed dirt over it and packed it down. We thought the critters that may roam around our area would be less likely to dig. We used staples and pounded them at intervals into the chicken wire. They don't make the staples like they used to. Many of them ended up bent and many words were used in the making of this coop. The window will have plexiglass placed over it so we can see in and they can see the sun rise.

I now have some of the coop painted and you can notice the water and food hanging from the inside ceiling with chain and carbiner clips. The ramp is a makeshift piece of barn siding for now. We will put a final one up in little while. There is a small door that leads into the coop where they roost for the night and their nesting boxes are in there. This door gets locked up with a padlock every night after the sun goes down. We have never had a problem (yet) with critters. Not even evidence of something snooping around. We do know there are coyotes and raccoons in the area because we have seen and heard them. But we also have neighbors with beagles and hunting guns. : )

Below is a picture of the front of the chicken condo. The plexiglass has been added to the front for a window. On the left side, you can see the nesting box that sits off the inside chicken coop. The door to get into the coop is padlocked every night and throughout the day.

As we were working on the coop, we would let the chickens out and they would roam around the backyard. They inevitably ended up under our rhododendren bush. Since the neighbors have beagles, we didn't let them out for long. The following picture shows a good view of the nesting box.

Below is a side and back view of the condo. The door in the back lifts up and hooks with a chain so that I can clean out the inside of the chicken coop. In the summer when it was hot, we would open this back door up all day and they would hop in and out of the coop. They could roam around the enclosed run that we set up. This door and the door to open the nesting box are also padlocked. It's about as secure as Fort Knox. If a raccoon can figure this out, I think we may all be in trouble.

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