Here's how I built our new chicken coop this spring! Since the coop has been completed, I built an 8x10x9 covered run complete with a misting system and a hose attachment to make filling up their waterers a lot easier! I attached a few more photos of the run and interior.
The video is complete with my "how to" build and I kind of combined two plans that I found online; one for a chicken coop and the other one was for a 6x6 shed. These two plans helped me with my materials purchase and overall layout throughout the process.
The reason I wanted to built a new coop was to fix all of the mistakes we made with our first coop. The biggest being ease of cleaning. Our new coop has 9' ceilings at the peak and the floors can be swept out, hosed out and easily wiped clean. We also wanted to have shelving for food/treat storage along with removable bins underneath the roost bars so that we could just dump out the poop and pine shavings into our compost pile and disinfect them easily. The nesting boxes are the same concept and we have removable inserts in each of our 4 nesting boxes which allow them to be dumped out, cleaned and refilled with fresh pine shavings at any time. The new coop has ventilation in the top gables as well as an air circulation fan and window to keep them cooler on summer nights.
In hindsight, I probably could have purchased a shed at home depot for about what I paid to build this, but my coop has an insulated subfloor, an easy to clean laminate flooring, insulated interior walls and ventilation in the top end gables. At the end of the day, I'm extremely happy with the end result and only wish that I had gone larger!!
We would love an automatic door opener so we can attach it to the west side of our coop that goes into a separate garden area where the girls can run and scratch around.
