How many chickens for family and coop?

[CarolJ]

Five hens would provide plenty of eggs for your family - as long as you get the right breeds. Do you want white eggs, brown eggs, blue/green eggs - or a combination. A Rhode Island Red, some type of leghorn, a couple of Easter Eggers and a sex link should give you a great variety of egg colors (I like a colorful egg basket!), and plenty of eggs, too.

How big the coop is depends on where you live and how much time the chickens will spend outside. I got a very large coop - but the chicken don't go into the coop except to lay eggs and to go to roost at night. The rest of the time they're outside in the run. So I would not worry if the coop is small as long as the run is large.

As others have said, there are coops that are really nice looking. Look through the chicken coop plans here on BYC and find one that would fit 5 chickens - you can show the pics to your parents and talk about how to make it fit your neighborhood.

Good luck!

 

[gardendufus]

MIBS........Maybe I can chime in on possible costs. I had no luck finding stuff on Craigslist as lots of people around here suggest, at least not in the timeframe I was looking at, so I bought most of my stuff from Home Depot. I bought windows from the Habitat for Humanity Restore (actually they gave me most of the windows I wanted for free). If you are in an area that you can get materials from Craigslist or from a recycling store, your coop could be much less expensive (I'm assuming you are looking for cheap to encourage your parents).

My coop, which I will finish tomorrow except for painting is an 8 X 10, slant roof, shed type coop (I must add this is with a dirt floor, NOT a wood floor). This is about twice the size of what you should need for as many as 10 chickens. To date I have about $75 in 2 X 4's and 4 X 4's. About $75 in plywood sheathing. $40 in Hardware Cloth (from Big R Farm Supply where I could buy large rolls, this was just a portion of a roll. Also a large portion of the front side of my coop, about 30 sq ft is hardware cloth), and $100 in sheet metal roofing. Plus assorted nails, screws and washers $25.00. So thats a total of about $315.00, say $350 for whatever I forgot plus painting. For the Coop Only.

Add to that the cost of the fencing you will need for the run. I went 6' tall on my fence, and expect my run to be about 20' by 30' (again probably much larger than you need, if you went with 10 chicks you could get by easily with 10 X 10 and some people will say less). I did not have to buy fenceposts as I have some laying around, and I picked up cull wood 2" X 6" X 4' to attach the wire at the bottom at Home Depot. The wire for this fence cost me (hmmmm I bought it months ago), I think it was about $150 (Not from Home Depot, the Big R farm supply was cheaper). the wood is insignificant compared to the cost of the wire.

So, all told I'm looking at about $500 to $600 invested in coop and run. I'm an oldish single woman, who has never built anything before and my coop will be finished tomorrow. Actual construction time has been about 30 hours so far, hit and miss as the Colorado weather allowed. I expect another 5 hours tomorrow. If I can do this alone, you and your dad should be able to do it better and quicker. It could be a great bonding experience.

I got lots of help and advice here on BYC. Every time I had a question about how to frame something, how to put the roof together, what materials I needed to get, I just started a thread and told them what my problem was and by the next day I had pretty much all the info I needed.