Welcome to our coop page.  We are first-time backyard chicken owners and most of what we learned has come from this website.  Designing and building the coop was our biggest challenge.  At first I was a little miffed by the lack of standard plans to be found on the Internet, but now that we're done with construction and the chickens are well settled, we realized that making a customized coop is part of the fun and uniqueness of having backyard chickens.  My suggestions for designing and building a coop are:

Take an honest look at your space limitations, your needs, and what you desire in convienence in terms of access to clean, change water, feed, gather eggs, etc.

Study carefully all of the pictures on the coop page to see what other people have done with their coops.  Also, if you google "chicken coops" using Google Images you'll see a bunch more.

Avoid the temptation to take shortcuts on your design or build quality.  Design and build for the long term.  You want a strong and well sealed coop to withstand the weather.

Budget plenty of time and allow for extra expenses.  My history with projects has taught me that I should double the amount of time I plan to spend on a project and include lots of room for extra trips to Lowes or HD.

Be very careful about ordering online plans!  I've seen the plans for two of the most heavily advertised coop plans and they are far from what they advertise.

Finally, if you have chicks and think you have plenty of time to get a coop built, think again.  They grow quickly and the coop building process can be slow.  Start now.

 Our chicks.  I'm using two heat lamps so I can adjust the temp by turning one off if needed.  This is in our garage so the temperature varies depending on the outside weather.

Why they all crowd around one or two holes for food I'm not sure.

About 2 weeks old.

Partial framing of the coop.  I'm using the "Playhouse Coop" as my inspiration. I'm trying to prime all the wood as I go, that is why it's all white.  The final color scheme with be barnyard red with white trim.

Here it is with the roof shingled.  It took two days to shingle the roof but could have been done in one.  The hardest part was the fact that I used architectural shingles and not 3 tab shingles which made it very difficult to cut out the ridge pieces.  I was able to find two bundles of 30 yr Owens Corning shingles sold as 2nd qaulity for $12 a bundle.  I only had one left over piece.  The two roof panels measure 32x96.

 This shows how I'm using my Kreg jig to make pocket holes.  Pocket hole joinery is extremely easy if you use the jig and makes a rock solid joint.  You can see that the trusses are joined at the top with three screws.  Then I joined the trusses to the 2x4's running along the front and back walls.  These provide the joint to the whole frame and fill in the voids between the trusses.  I used 3/4 ply for the roof and so far there's no sagging between the three trusses.  I was originally going to do a flat roof and had I to do it over again, I probably would have used 4 trusses

This is where we stopped for the day... 5-16-09.  We have a few more sections of hardware cloth to put on, the trim boards around the house, some final detail painting and then the ramp to the house door.  We'll try to finish it all off tomorrow.

The following pictures are of the progress we made on 5-17-09.  The only work remaining is the touch up and detail paint on some of the trim.

The nestbox is removable through the access door.  Also, I stapled a piece of vinyl flooring to the top to make clean up easier.

This is the view looking through the nestbox door.

This is the view looking through the window just above the nestbox door.  The roosts are set into some wooden brackets and are removable for cleaning.  I should also mention that the floor sits on wooden cleats and can be completely removed from the bottom.  I also covered the floor with vinyl.

This is the solar panel mounted on the outside of the coop.  There are two spot type lights inside the house and one in the run area which points at the house door.  They are LED and provide just enough light to illuminate but are not too bright.