Haha, so true! That second picture by Rickba, easily $10,000 or even more, with a contractor, yet with patience, hard work sourcing and finding free materials, and his own sweat, $1,000. In a nut shell, there's your variables.
This really depends on how well you want to accomplish your goals, you have many.
You can reel off what you want to a contractor today, and they'll be building it next week, but you're going to pay top dollar.
There's an old saying a lot of people know, that's incredibly true. Look at any project you've ever done and it applies, it did in my case at least.
There's three aspects to any project or product.
Price, quality, and speed of delivery. You can have any two of these in a project, in any combination, but never all three. Try it out it works.
So, in your case is speed paramount, if so, you can get speed, but you only get one more, you pick.
Given speed, do you want quality, then the lost variable is price, it will be expensive. That's the contractor building off your wish list next week.
Given speed, do you want a good price, then you will sacrifice quality. If I want a cheap price and speed, I'm buying a prefab at
Tractor Supply, that's poorly designed and poorly built, but I'm taking it home tonight.
Rickba chose price and quality. He gave up speed. It takes time find free materials, gain knowledge to build something that actually works, and to use your own labor to build it.
You have a lot of different goals in what you want to build. It's good to be aware of what you want because now you must decide which two of the three variables you're picking.
I did a lot of research here before I built, plus I've always been interested in architecture, have built a passive solar house, studied historical houses and learned how they kept structures cool, warm, and well ventilated without the central heat and air conditioning we have. These principles are a lost art in the days of central heat and air, but chicken houses don't have that.
But these principles are the absolute bedrock of a design for your chickens that will be the best possible living space for your chickens, keeping them healthy and happy, while at the same time reducing your work load.
I don't mention reducing your work load because it's good for you, I mention it because it's good for your chickens. If your design requires you do unpleasant tasks frequently, and you don't, the chickens suffer.
Cute prefab chicken houses can quickly turn into death traps for chickens because their design is so fragile and poor. If you are negligent in managing poop, your cute prefab will turn into an ammonia gas chamber for the poor birds forced to live in it.
I've been in chicken houses of friends that the ammonia is so bad, it practically twists your head off if you stick your head in their coop. They think it's fine because they're not the ones spending half of every day in there.
When I even hear the word tray, I know someone needs to do more reading. It's not anyone's fault, the basic principles are easy to understand, it's just it doesn't come up in everyday life, it's not taught.
Search on Woods Open Air chicken houses, that'll get you on your way to understanding what principles must be included in your design, then with that foundation, it's very, very, very, easy to add on easy things like separation, perches, nest boxes etc.
I know you don't realize it, because almost no one does, until coming here and doing research, but if you understand those few principles Dr Wood used, you'll have a great coop. Almost any design can be modified to use them.
Here's a link to a post that gives you a little more detail about the designs of Dr Woods, he was a pioneer in developing the healthiest chicken houses about a hundred years ago.
Unfortunately, just as he perfected the use of these principles, the factory farm system was fully embraced in the US, with grocery stores providing most food. His work was almost lost, thank goodness he wrote several books which preserved it.
Read post number 16 on this page, the basic design principles are explained.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/th...ods-semi-monitor-10-x-16-house.1220460/page-2
You're very smart, you're asking for advice, you're not blundering ahead making lots of expensive mistakes. You're profiting from the vast experience and enormous storehouse of mistakes that others have made and reported here.
Business seminars preach that you only learn from failures, not success, again if you think about it, it's true. Mistakes teach us what doesn't work, and that's important.
If you're willing to do some reading, you're going to have a wonderful design that meets all your needs, and as a side benefit is easier for you to maintain, because addressing the possibility of the human failure, especially when the system demands unpleasant tasks, and removing those tasks, makes the system easier on you, and safer for the birds whose lives depend on the system working properly.
