Chain-link dog kennel run looking to expand with exterior coop

[beilka]

Hi everyone! New to the chicken-keeping thing and we are trying to set up our first home for our chickens. We have a 5x15 chain link dog kennel run that is fortified by hardware wire and has a small commercially built coop in it. We have recently acquired more chicks and want to expand the coop to be on the exterior of the kennel with some sort of pop door cut into the kennel so that they have the full area of the run and the coop doesn't take up their space. I was hoping maybe some of y'all have similar setups that you could send some pics or give some input? Any recommendations on how to effectively connect the coop to the kennel would be great! And of course any input on the construction of the coop would be helpful too. I know the basic design that chickens need but know also that personal experiences make a big difference!

We are in central city New Orleans on our little urban homestead, so predators would mainly be racoons, opossums, feral cats and rodents (we do have pretty bog river rats around these parts!). Not sure how many of our chicks will turn out to be gals because they are wild/feral chickens we captured and are keeping but we have 6 babies in there right now with the momma hen.

Thanks in advance for all your help!

 

[black_cat]

I'm wondering if you could completely remove the panel of the narrow end where you want to attach the new coop? If it's going to be raised, you could turn the underneath into more run space, and your coop dimensions would be 5' by however many feet back from where it meets the run. You could just connect the coop to the edges of the other panels instead of having to cut the wire.