My husband didn't want to buy a ready made chicken coop. Here is his design "so far".
Our girls are 1 week old. they are so fun, and so cute.
I'm the proud mother hen.
Any suggestions would be great. We are newbies at this!
I'm new to this too and another "victim" of the Sunset magazine article that my wife read.
Also in Southern California in a tract house but a larger back yard then most. Our lot is somewhere shy of a half an acre. Much of the back yard is taken up by our pool area but somehow we managed to set asside enough area for our coop and run.
8 chicks to start, 4 rhode island reds and 4 silver wyandottes. One RIR died. Now at about 7 weeks it's clear one of the SLWs is a roo, the rest appear to all be hens.
I perused this site quite a bit gathering data for our coop. As I've never framed or roofed anything before so I needed all the help I could get. I'm pretty sure the finished product would pass inspection for an atomic shelter, perhaps I over did it a bit.
We got as much of the materials as possible from our habitat for humanity store but still ended up at Lowes more times then desired and spent quite a bit more then expected for the whole thing. somewhere in the neighborhood of $800 when all was said and done for the materials, feed and chicken accessories.
Now we have an $800 chicken prison to protect $14 worth of chickens!