I love chickens, always have. And now that we have some land I can finally get some!
We plan on doing 4-H with the kids, have some layer and would like to do meat birds also *but that will have to wait*
I came across some pallets on the side of the road with free sprayed on the side. So I ran home and got the trailer. I hefted these suckers in the trailer and strapped them down. I'm still trying to figure out how I did it alone. These pallets were used in shipping marble, so they were not light by any means. The each had three sides along with the base.
I took them home and broke them down and salvage as much wood as possible. I decided not to break up the base of the largest, thought I could use it for the floor of "something." That something bacame the floor to my coop.
So the base/floor is roughly 5x7' and I am giving it 4' walls. I have many old windows I got from freecycle.org and reframed many of them for my cold frames. I decided to take some and use them for the coop. Since it is so dreary here in the winter I have at least one window in each wall. It main "door" will be two larger windows that open out.
I am supporting the floor in 3' pressure treated post in each corner and then putting it on cement pilars with metal braces. With it being this high I sould be able to stand at the "doors" and reach any corner inside the coop with a rake. If that doesn't work, I'll just send in one of the kids!!
I'm 6' tall so I'm not going in there!
I went with the nest box on the out side with a lid. This may look odd but it is an outter wall laying on the floor while I make the nest box to fit. My chubby baby/helper thinks she needs to hold it down.
I put the dividers on runners so I can slide them out, if I need to, for cleaning. You can kind of see the roost for the nest box laying there in front of it. I attached it unthe 2x4 that the nest box attaches to.
I can already tell that I'm going to need to add on. Its amazing how fast we have out grown this one and we don't even have the chickens yet!
We plan on doing 4-H with the kids, have some layer and would like to do meat birds also *but that will have to wait*
I came across some pallets on the side of the road with free sprayed on the side. So I ran home and got the trailer. I hefted these suckers in the trailer and strapped them down. I'm still trying to figure out how I did it alone. These pallets were used in shipping marble, so they were not light by any means. The each had three sides along with the base.
I took them home and broke them down and salvage as much wood as possible. I decided not to break up the base of the largest, thought I could use it for the floor of "something." That something bacame the floor to my coop.
So the base/floor is roughly 5x7' and I am giving it 4' walls. I have many old windows I got from freecycle.org and reframed many of them for my cold frames. I decided to take some and use them for the coop. Since it is so dreary here in the winter I have at least one window in each wall. It main "door" will be two larger windows that open out.
I am supporting the floor in 3' pressure treated post in each corner and then putting it on cement pilars with metal braces. With it being this high I sould be able to stand at the "doors" and reach any corner inside the coop with a rake. If that doesn't work, I'll just send in one of the kids!!
I went with the nest box on the out side with a lid. This may look odd but it is an outter wall laying on the floor while I make the nest box to fit. My chubby baby/helper thinks she needs to hold it down.
I put the dividers on runners so I can slide them out, if I need to, for cleaning. You can kind of see the roost for the nest box laying there in front of it. I attached it unthe 2x4 that the nest box attaches to.
I can already tell that I'm going to need to add on. Its amazing how fast we have out grown this one and we don't even have the chickens yet!