Our "Oak Abode" chicken coop

[Wubba]

Very nice! Plus, the chicken door is elevated...DLM ready! Well done.

 

[lwrightpt]

Oak Abode Coop
My wife and I just finished building our chicken coop and we are rather proud of ourselves. We have almost no carpentry experience, so it was quite the challenge for us. We saw this coop on YouTube and I have posted the link above. We live in South Dakota in a city. so we are operating under some restrictions. We are allowed to have no more than 6 hens and no roosters. The coop should be no larger than 30 sq ft and the run should be no larger than 60 sq ft. We purchased the plans for the coop from Oak Abode's ETSY shop. This coop is slightly larger than the allowed size at 32 sq ft. This is because plywood and studs come in 8 ft sections. I could have modified it to 30 sq ft but I am hoping no one from the city shows up with a tape measure. We liked the raised design because it allows the chickens to have a shaded and protected area and it adds a stealthy extra 32 sq ft to the size of our run (which is already accounted for by the coop). We purchased a cheap metal run on Amazon that is 6.6 ft by 10 ft. This gives our chickens 66 sq ft + 32 sq ft =96 sq ft of run space for 16 sq ft per bird. The coop provides 5+ sq ft per bird. We enclosed the underneath of the coop with hardware cloth. Unfortunately, our bargain run is only enclosed in chicken wire but we know the risks. We live in the city and have a 6ft privacy fence for our backyard. The only predators I have seen are a neighbors cat, hawks and the occasional bald eagle which shouldn't penetrate the chicken wire. The designers of the coop live in Wisconsin which has similar weather to us. Summers are short and mild and winter is long and brutal. In winter we will most likely wrap the run in a tarp or some kind of plastic sheeting to minimize wind and snow exposure to our flock. We have 3 silver laced Wyandot hens aged 9 weeks and 3 gold laced Wyandotte chickens aged 15 and 10 weeks. We chose them because they are known to be cold hardy. Here are photos of the finished coop. If there is an interest, I will post photos we took during various stages of construction.

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We were thinking about doing this coop. Did you also modify the floor for a tray clean out method? The reason I ask is it looks like under your main access door, there's a board/tray that might slide. If so, could you tell us more about that please?

 

[South Dakota Guy]

We were thinking about doing this coop. Did you also modify the floor for a tray clean out method? The reason I ask is it looks like under your main access door, there's a board/tray that might slide. If so, could you tell us more about that please?

We didn't incorporate a slide for the floor. We did put some cheap linoleum flooring down over the plywood floor. So far it seems to be holding up well. We are using the deep litter method, so we only plan on cleaning out once or twice a year. When we bought our house the previous owners left behind something I can only describe as a snow rake. It also has a handle extension. We plan on using that to pull the pine shavings out of the door and into a wagon we have. So far we are really happy with our coop. One change I would recommend is to make the roost moveable so in the warm months the chickens can sit up high and can take advantage of the breeze coming in. They also enjoy looking outside.