Converting a barn stall into a coop with small yard

[INDovey]

I'm really getting excited about building my new in stall coop. We have spent the past 2 days tearing down an old garage shed that is about 100 years old, and it really gave me some great ideas for my coop. We will be using the old wood, siding and cedar shingles to build the coop. I saw a picture of Johnny Cash's log cabin and decided to replicate it for my coop. We also salvaged the old 24" glass pane door and the matching screen door, along with some old pane windows and shutters. I will be using all of these items to make the coop. The doors will go on the side so that I can enter the coop from the stall next to the chicken stall. The windows will be set on their side to make longer windows with glass that will swing up and hook to open the coop and allow ventilation through the 1/2" x 1/2" galvanized wire that we also found in the old shed. under the windows will be what appears to be window box seats, but will actually be the back half of the nest boxes and will lower for egg gathering from the little railed porch of the coop, the rails will be low enough to be roosts. The coop will be on stilts to allow run area under the coop with a chicken plank instead of stairs up to the porch and will have roosts on each side along with mock hand rails that could also be used as roosts. I also salvaged a 100 yr old singer treddle sewing machine that is missing the side frames, but we will make wooden ones and clean and paint the old machine and treddle with easy clean paint so the chickens can roost on it. There will also be a small old tricycle sitting on the porch for them to roost on. I also found an old mini wood burning pot belly stove that I will put back to gather, clean and paint to set on the corner of the porch, just because I think it is too cute to throw out. The final touch to the out side will be a mock cabin door with the bottom section made to slide and lock up for the chicken door. I found an old round brass decorative wall hanging that I will mount on the mock door and fill with silk flowers to accent the door... this is going to be so cute. There will also be windows on the side opposite my full sized access door and on the back, both will be glass pane windows that tilt up and lock to allow the wire to vent the air when needed.

I'm sill working out the details for the inside of the coop, but plan to also use the 100 yr old wood and accents that will be functional and cute. All of this will look so nice in our barn, which is also over 100 yrs old. My sweetheart is right... these are going to be the most spoiled NON PET chickens anyone ever owned!!!

 

[INDovey]

Well, we have finished the outside of our barn stall coop and now only need to install the roosts and the 1/2" x 1/2" wire to the windows of the coop to complete the building. We still need to complete the wire around the stall and add a feeder which will be made from old gutters that have been fitted into a wooden frame to look like an old horse trough. This will be located just in front of the porch area opposite of the chicken plank. We also need to add a frame which will be used to hold wood ash for the chicken dust bath.

I'm also playing with the idea of adding plant boxes and window boxes with 2" x 2" wire cage tops, for shade loving plants that the chickens can nibble without killing. I'd love to find shade loving plants that attract insects for the chickens, while not being a preferred food source as a plant.

I still need to figure out where we will have additional roost areas in the stall run, since the porch roosts will not be enough for 12-15 chickens. Any suggestions on plants, changes or possible problems with the current design are welcome.

 

[crash2001]

This is awesome!

 

[INDovey]

Thanks crash2001, we are very proud of our coop. I had to laugh when my mother first saw it the other day and asked "What is this cute little old building in the barn?"... she thought the structure had always been there and was so taken with the building that she did not even notice the chicken plank attached to the porch... LOL... which was especially funny since I told her to just walk all the way down the isle and look to her left (the coop is the only thing there) The goal was to make the coop look like a small pioneer trading post from about 1849 (same age as the barn)... I guess Mom's comment says that we managed to make the coop appear original to the old barn.

 

[aart]

Hmmm interesting....it look nothing like the model on the first post!!

Would be nice to see some pics from farther away.....and hear more about the setup.....run, free ranged?

 

[INDovey]

Yes aart the design changed greatly after we torn down a 100 yr old building on the property and obtained some amazing old material to work with on the coop. My son took this pic, but I will get a new battery for my digital camera and post a few more. The setup is simply a raised floor and 24" wide porch that stand 21" above the brick floor of the barn stall. The actual coop is 5 ft x 12 ft and stands 7 ft from coop floor to ceiling. All of the windows hinge from the top and have 1/2" x 1/2" galvanized wire framed in behind the glass windows. The two front windows will open and hook to the framing of the cedar shingle porch roof. The windows on the sides and back will have wooden rods that prop the windows open to allow for cool air in the summer and will close to maintain heat in the winter. All three of the windows that are located outside of the stall will be latched to protect against intruders. The front door is 5' 2" tall and 24" wide with the original screen still in place, but has wooden planks inserted into the bottom section and the galvanized wire framed in behind the old screen. We will insert a fitted piece of wood into the top of the door during the winter. There are two chicken doors that are 14" x 16" located under each window in the front that will be connected to a pulley system which will allow me to open the doors from the outside next to the 4 compartment nest box. The top of the two side walls of the coop will have small vent sections that are also covered in the wire. These will provide constant air flow year round. I plan to use sand and wood chips in the coop and run area for easy clean up.

The stall is 12 ft x 14 ft and has a 21" tall brick footer built into the stall walls on all sides, half of the stall area is open run and the other half is the run area under the coop. The stall will be completely predator proof after we seal all of the cracks between the planks and add the galvanized wire. The side where the nest box can be accessed from the outside is an old milking stall with solid concrete flooring. This is where the door will be and where I will also have my brooder area so that new chicks can visit the rest of the flock until time to join the main coop. The milking stall has a concrete trough cut into the floor that I will use to load and unload the chickens for daily free range. I've already trained my young birds to load and unload willingly into a transport cage... it take the current 9 birds about 3 seconds to load and unload. They are free ranging daily in a tractor run and we will build more as needed. We plan to turn an old sulky pony cart into a chicken transport so all of the chickens can be moved at one time to various tractor runs located on the farm.

This is a little hard to envision so I will try to get pics of as much of it as I can.

 

[INDovey]

We began this project in a 12ft x 14ft stall that had originally been used as the bull pen. This stall is centrally located in the 166 yr old barn, and has a full brick floor and complete 18" brick footer all the way around. All of the wood, windows and doors were salvaged from an old building of about the same age as the barn. After cleaning the old stall, we built the coop building platform on top of the 18" brick footer. This platform is used as the front porch and the inside floor of the elevated coop. We then built the wall frame, window frames, chicken hatches and door frame. Next we added the wood siding to the coop part of the old stall. The next step was to create the shingled roof over the porch area and add the porch rails and steps. The shingles are old cedar shingles which were also salvaged from the old destroyed building. Install the roosts, doors and windows and that completed the first phase of the build.





In the final phase we added the egg box, which contains 4 nest boxes of 14" x 18", The egg box was also constructed of salvage materials from the same approximate time period as the barn in order to complete the illusion that the coop had always been a part of the original barn.


The reinforced wire door is the one part of the project that did not come from original time period materials. This was the door to an old raccoon cage that had belonged to an injured rescue raccoon (he had three legs and lived his life out on the farm). The door handle however authentic to the barn's original time period. If you look at the area between the egg box and the door, you will see a wooden area near the floor, this is actually another chicken door that we use to load the chickens into a transport cage when taking them out to free range. We just place the cage down, open the hatch door and out runs the girls right into the cage for transport... it's really cool.

We added a dust bed to the floor of the run area. We fill this with sand and hardwood ash. However, this picture was taken just the other day and due to the winter deep litter method being used, the dusting box is currently gathering a few more shavings than is normal.


Behind one of our roosters you can see one of the original walls used when this stall was a bull pen. This side only covered 3/4 of the wall space, so we left it to protect from winter winds while allowing the top 1/4 to be screened in for ventilation. The full wall of the bull pen was used as the back wall of the coop building. The wall facing the isle of the barn is 1/4" sq stock fencing. This was used to secure all outside walls of the run area.



We used an old piece of gutter divided into three sections as an open feeder. Above the feeder is the front roost that spans the full 12 ft and allows the chickens to check out anything that is going on in the barn at that moment.

Here is Blue standing on the outside edge of the dust bed.