First coop build

[Machseven]

Hey everyone, my coop is coming along. I've appreciated other people's postings, and maybe my efforts can help someone.

My wife was interested (in chickens) before I was. I got more interested when I got into intermittent fasting, which has helped me lose weight. Working from home gives me more access to cooking eggs, which I do daily (usually four). When things got so crazy this year with the riots and masks, I also learned more about how vulnerable the food supply chain really is. I now want to live with the Amish and start a homestead! But in the meantime, learning to garden and raise chickens make a lot of sense.

For inspiration, my wife kept showing me Carolina Coop videos. They do look nice, but I thought I could build one cheaper. Now that I'm nearly complete, I doubt that's true. I happen to buy my lumber in September, when lumber futures peaked. However, I have really enjoyed learning how to build a chicken coop and use a variety of new tools. I'll share my various influences as I progress with this thread.

 

[Machseven]

Got most of the wall done around the nesting box, but my wife wants a window over the nesting box so I'll have to get that done.

 

[Machseven]

 

[U_Stormcrow]

follow up. Looks like you were using the really expensive underlayment, starting on the bottom course, then overlapping each higher course till you ran out??? and then used left over shingles to complete the top rows??? What did you put under them??? Shingle on bare wood is a recipe for disaster. Enough so that I would recommend carefully pulling them all up before they get too stiff, laying some paper, then re-nailing them!

 

[rosemarythyme]

Ramp

Looks a bit steep, you might need to plan out how to reduce the angle on that (like using a landing halfway down and then turning it 90) if the birds won't use it.

 

[humblehillsfarm]

Good luck! We’ve been working in building a coop too. We also bought all of our materials in September. It’s expensive!

 

[Machseven]

Here is the site selected for the coop. We decided to use the Palace Chicken Coop plans, which has a 12' x 6' footprint. However, I got very stuck right off the bat because the foundation in the plans is poured concrete with a fairly sophisticated network of PVC drains intended to keep flat land from puddling. I have sloped land and I didn't want to pour concrete, so I looked around at other ideas.

 

[CluckerFamily]

I chose to build my run on top of concrete blocks (bigger than bricks) and my coop I built as a walk-in off the ground, this was built on patio post blocks.

 

[Machseven]

My first deviation from the Palace plan was to buy 4x4 pressure treated wood for the base in lieu of the poured concrete. I would extend posts down to the blocks. Each pair of blocks I levelled on top of crushed rock that I tamped down. I had left over crushed rock from a fire pit I had built last year. I used about 3-4" of crushed rock for each block. I built batter boards to run string to locate the corners of the blocks and align them. I was trying to get the blocks close to 12' x 6'. The batter boards worked pretty well - you level them with string to each other, then run string between them to form a rectangle to the size you want the foundation to be. Then you use the 3-4-5 rule to square the shape, then measure the diagonals for final check. I got my diagonals within a 1/4", and decided that's close enough. I tend toward needless perfectionism, so I began to tell myself "It's just a chicken coop."

 

[Machseven]

One thing about string though - I never did get the 4x4's level just using string and the little hanging level. I used the string to cut posts, then I cut the posts, but they would be off quite a bit when I checked with my larger level. So string was good for roughing in the block locations, but I either lacked the right technique or I should have used a laser or something for actually cutting the length of the posts. Those black things are shims I made from roof shingles that I had to add on top of the post to get the one side level. Later I cut a post to a proper length.