show me your small open coop (hot climate) designs please, and any and all ideas welcome :)

So we originally bought one of those pre-fab made in china coops that say they can house 3-5 chickens but can only really house two, which we added a small run to, but... I hate this coop. It is hard to clean, and the nesting boxes are on the same level as the roosts so you get chickens sleeping in nest boxes and not on roosts, and it is not really made for our hotter climate...we are in the process of incubating eggs so we want to make a bigger coop that can hold max 6 hens (we can't have roosters where we live).

Space is a commodity so it would probably 5' x 8' if that's big enough (but I will make it as big as we can). We currently free range our two chickens but just saw a HUGE coyote at 9am in our front yard and sometimes we go out of town for a couple of weeks so they only free range a couple of hours a day and sometimes they get cooped up for a couple of weeks. I also know to allow at least 1 foot roost space per bird.

Wish list- poop boards, roosts that are higher than nest boxes, walk in height, easy to clean flooring, predator proof, way to feed and water chickens without going into coop, way to collect eggs without going into coop, skylight of some kind for days when they don't go out?

Also please post your coop even if it doesn't have something on our wish list- I'm trying to get as many ideas as I can. Thanks for your help!

Check out my profile I have a good design for hot climate. Light weight houses three hens one rooster .

4x8 homemade. First coop I built. 4 years old. Seems great for our north Carolina climate. We use it for young birds now.

Very small coop made from pallets. Keep a rooster in it.

Here are our original two coops. One houses 3 standard hens, and the other houses 4 bantams.


The following coop is our last. It houses 4 standard hens. (We will be constructing one large coop for everybody this spring...)

It is easy to clean because the entire front panel on the bottom lifts up and latches to the top. Also, the top panel in front of the nest boxes opens for retrieving eggs and cleaning.

Check out Heritage Ways Farm's design: http://www.facebook.com/Heritage.Ways.Farm/photos_stream

We built one of these, except we used hardware cloth for the 'inside' front wall for better ventilation.

NightHawk123's design is more chicken-friendly -- I had to add perches in the outside section so they can get up above the plywood skirt and see out.

-Wendy