Construction has begun

Construction has finally begun on our coop! It has rained almost non-stop since I brought our 5 girls home on April 1st. but it did give us the time to come up with a plan that we love.

We are city folks and new to all of this. So, we had no idea when I did a google search for chicken coops that we were going to be bombarded with so many fabulous options! Thankfully, we found BYC to help with the design!

To say that we were ignorant is an understatement. We would have sealed that coop up like Fort Knox without a vent hole one, thinking we were protecting them from cold. Predators? What predators? We live in the city we don't have no stinkin' predators...turns out all were missing in the predator department is lions and tigers and bears. Oh my! Square footage per bird? huh? We had some learning to do!

We watched videos, looked at plans, read all we could find here at BYC about coop building. We took ideas that we liked from lots of different coops and mashed them together into what we are building.

Before we get to the photos I want to give you a little background on us, our neighborhood and the impact of this coop and the girls...We live in the third largest historic district in the nation, Old Louisville. Even though we live in the city we still have nearly a 1/4 acre lot, one of the largest in the neighborhood.

We have a very active community and everyone knows everyone and all their business. My husband and I own an award winning, window restoration company so a lot of the neighbors are also our clients.

Well, it has gotten around that we have chickens and folks have just started turning up to see, feed, hold, pet, take selfies, etc...with the chickens! Our girls are celebrities! I went off to a neighborhood association meeting the other night, some of the smaller neighborhood children that had been by, ran up and gave me big hugs! I was so thrilled! There is now talk of having us on the Garden Tour next year.

Without further ado here are some photos of what got done yesterday. The hubby had put together the two H frames at the shop the day before and got all this put together before I thought to take photos. He is standing in the middle of what will be the coop floor and towards the fence is going to be a storage box. The coop is 4'x6' and it will have a run 6'x8'.


He notched out the 4x4's for the frame.



Put in the floor joists which extend to the nest box. No sagging happening here.





Framing in the storage box.


Storage box framed in. Set in place and leveled.


There will be roosts above the storage box and a slide out tray to dispose of the poops.

Awesome! Looks very sturdy...probably could hold an elephantine chicken!

Exciting, looks like a nice and well-built coop. Glad you found all this good info! I had no idea either.

Well, we didn't get as much done today as we would have liked. In conjunction with building the coop we are also building a privacy fence along the west side of our back yard. There was 200' of 66 year old chain link fence there. It was a hideous mess with all manner of crapola growing through it and around it.

Three of the neighbors on that side agreed to go in with us to replace the fence, but now one of them has their home on a tour that is coming up soon, and it won't quit raining long enough to get the fence up. So, we had to work mostly on that today.

My poor yard looks like the wreck of the Hesperus! The Girls are out there in their temporary coop. There are piles of lumber and fence pickets everywhere. My compost pile was displaced and is currently piled on a huge piece of 6mil plastic under the only tree on that side we didn't have ripped out. Lawn furniture is strewn about. The lawn mower decide to shoot craps, not that it matters much with all the stuff everywhere no one wants to mow anyway.

We did get all the decking in and the inside pieces of the storage box. Then I primed all the edges with oil based primer. Tomorrow the DH wants me to prime the rest of the structure before he does the framing.