MoonShadows
The Jam Man
MoonShadows Farm Chicken Coop and Run
Originally from the city, we moved to the suburbs and eventually to the country here in Stroudsburg, PA 18 years ago. We have 16 acres, mostly wooded, and we always talked about raising chickens. Finally, this year, we decided to make it a reality. Sixteen chicks arrived in early April and were placed in our homemade brooder. Next task was to build a coop for them. We poured over the coop designs and coop posts on BYC in addition to buying Chicken Coops for Dummies. Our coop design began to take shape.The coop is 10' x 8' with 6' 6" walls and a gabled roof. The run will be 32' x 10'. The coop has 5 windows, an automatic chicken door, a human door, a bump out nesting area with 5 nesting boxes, 2 rows of roosts over galvanized pans, two gable vents, an enclosed storage area for food and cleaning supplies, and room for a future brooder/hospital area. The interior floor is coated with a rubber roof coating (Blackjack 57), the exterior walls are of 1" rough cut Eastern Yellow Pine (for an older look), and the roof is architectural asphalt shingles.
The Plans
Front
Front
Back
North Side
South Side
The Construction
The coop is about 50 feet behind our house on what used to be a hill going down to the back field. Last year we brought in about 25 dump trucks of fill to extend the yard by about another 18 feet, and it is on this "extension" that we decided to put the coop. As you can see, the area is still slightly slopped towards the field, so each pier is a different height. We decided to use concrete blocks placed on gravel for footings.
The base is built of 2x6s and pressure treated wood "plates" in each corner to rest on the concrete blocks.
Joists are hung using joist holders for extra strength.
The floor is 5/8 OSB. (I thought that would be sufficient, and it is just for chickens, but with joists on 24" centers,
there was a lot of give to the floor for us humans. I later added another 1/2" of plywood to the floor.)
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