As most of you know, laying hens are pretty simple critters. It doesn’t take a whole lot for them to thrive. Enough food and water. A safe place to roost and lay eggs. Add in enough calcium and light to keep them in a laying frame of mind and you can usually have success.
As has been well documented, chicken coops don’t have to be elaborate. That is, chickens don’t care how much you spend in terms of time and money. With this in mind I find the chicken coops I am drawn to are the ones that make it easy for chicken herders to take care of their flock. Accessible egg boxes, easy access for cleaning, and most important: the coop must be tall enough to walk in and out without bending over!(Trust me, there is nothing more maddening in the world than a coop door that is 5’7” when you are 5’8” tall!)
In terms of aesthetics, the only things I really look for are that the coop have clean lines and pleasing proportions.
My coop was designed and built in an effort to incorporate all these things.
Design Process:
The idea for this coop was to have a coop big enough for 12 or more birds. With two eight foot long roosts and plenty of nesting boxes. As chickens poop in their sleep I thought it would be convenient to try and get the poop to fall into a central location so all I needed to do was open the door and rake out the center bay. This idea had some flaws in it which required me to redesign the coop slightly after construction began.*
Construction:
As I was building this coop by myself I wanted to keep the construction doable by one person. I constructed a deck for the floor. Laid out all the walls flat and then tipped them up into place. I used a mixture of salvage materials (roofing and door) left over material (framing, paint) and new materials (flooring and walls.) It took several weeks to build but went up fairly easily. I only had one “Darwin award” where my wife came out and suggested a simpler method of screwing on the ridge vent that didn’t involve risking life and limb.
How it works:
I’m happy to report that the coop works pretty much as advertised. The only change I made to the design was that I made the shelves under the roosts flat. The original plan was for them to be sloped so the poop from both sides could roll down into some bedding in the central bay and be swept periodically out the door. *After trying it out I found it was simpler and easier to keep clean if the “poop shelf” was horizontal, lined with washable vinyl shelf paper, and covered with an inch of sawdust or sand. With this design, every morning I simply scoop the chicken poop into a bucket with a cat litter scoop. Thus I generate more or less pure chicken poo to throw in my compost pile. This makes my compost heat up like crazy!
