Hello members,
I just joined but, i have been reading through threads and have got allot of great ideas for our coop. my grandfather raided layers when i was a boy. after years i decided to follow in his footsteps. i got the idea but had no idea how to get started.i knew the first thing i would need is a coop of some sort. i Googled "chicken coop design's" and every pic i saw was from this sight. so i jumped to this sight and got stuck looking for hours one night. by the time i was too tired to continue i realized it was 3:00 AM and i had sat down at 9:00 PM. that's right six strait hours of reading threads looking at coops and reading story's people have posted about there BYC's and can i just say it shows that you all love your chickens and do all you can to provide them everything they need to be happy and healthy as well as providing your selves and your family's a level of sustainability. I LOVE THIS PLACE!!!!!. the next day i recruited my ten year old daughter Tayler to be my helper. first i sat her down and explained that i would like to get a few chickens for the eggs. well at this time she started going on about how this boy johnny at school has chickens and he brought then to school for the science fair and she learned all there is to know about chickens. so the first thing i asked her was, do i have to have a rooster to get eggs? she thought about it for a second and returned with yes because to get baby's (eggs) from a chicken there has to be a daddy and mommy chicken right? well i set her straight that the rooster is only needed to get chicks but hens will lay eggs with out the presents of a rooster. she still had questions and i told her we could talk about that later.we decided to look through some pics and decide what style coop we wanted to build. she had good input on that and we ultimately decided to build a simple design we can expand as we go. i was lucky enough that a friend had remodeled his house and gave me a large amount of used lumber. so i have a pile of 2 x 4's and started cutting and screwing boards. before we knew it it was mostly built and looked pretty good for scraps. we bought some of the materials and recycled the rest from other discarded furniture. desks mostly. once the structure was built we got the chicken wire and started attaching it. in all this took about ten hours over two days. once the coop was done we moved it from the garage where we built it out to the edge of the driveway where we would have easy access and they would be positioned under some shade during the hottest part of the day. we then took a trip to southern states and got some things. 1) 1 Gal. water container. 2) bag of layer feed 3) bag of oyster shell 4) bag of chicken grit. 5) 9 cu. ft. bag of pine shavings. i was able to save some money by building a feeder, grit container and oyster shell containers out of plastic used cleaned out coffee containers big one gallon cut at angle and two small cut in half with lid crammed into the bottom for added rigidity. we then put an add on craigslist asking for two - five chickens ready to lay. i got a few responces and ended up getting two rhode island reds and two black orpingtons. so far so good no eggs yet but i will keep you all up to date. thanks for reading and i look forward to getting and giving help to others via BYC thaks Gary
I just joined but, i have been reading through threads and have got allot of great ideas for our coop. my grandfather raided layers when i was a boy. after years i decided to follow in his footsteps. i got the idea but had no idea how to get started.i knew the first thing i would need is a coop of some sort. i Googled "chicken coop design's" and every pic i saw was from this sight. so i jumped to this sight and got stuck looking for hours one night. by the time i was too tired to continue i realized it was 3:00 AM and i had sat down at 9:00 PM. that's right six strait hours of reading threads looking at coops and reading story's people have posted about there BYC's and can i just say it shows that you all love your chickens and do all you can to provide them everything they need to be happy and healthy as well as providing your selves and your family's a level of sustainability. I LOVE THIS PLACE!!!!!. the next day i recruited my ten year old daughter Tayler to be my helper. first i sat her down and explained that i would like to get a few chickens for the eggs. well at this time she started going on about how this boy johnny at school has chickens and he brought then to school for the science fair and she learned all there is to know about chickens. so the first thing i asked her was, do i have to have a rooster to get eggs? she thought about it for a second and returned with yes because to get baby's (eggs) from a chicken there has to be a daddy and mommy chicken right? well i set her straight that the rooster is only needed to get chicks but hens will lay eggs with out the presents of a rooster. she still had questions and i told her we could talk about that later.we decided to look through some pics and decide what style coop we wanted to build. she had good input on that and we ultimately decided to build a simple design we can expand as we go. i was lucky enough that a friend had remodeled his house and gave me a large amount of used lumber. so i have a pile of 2 x 4's and started cutting and screwing boards. before we knew it it was mostly built and looked pretty good for scraps. we bought some of the materials and recycled the rest from other discarded furniture. desks mostly. once the structure was built we got the chicken wire and started attaching it. in all this took about ten hours over two days. once the coop was done we moved it from the garage where we built it out to the edge of the driveway where we would have easy access and they would be positioned under some shade during the hottest part of the day. we then took a trip to southern states and got some things. 1) 1 Gal. water container. 2) bag of layer feed 3) bag of oyster shell 4) bag of chicken grit. 5) 9 cu. ft. bag of pine shavings. i was able to save some money by building a feeder, grit container and oyster shell containers out of plastic used cleaned out coffee containers big one gallon cut at angle and two small cut in half with lid crammed into the bottom for added rigidity. we then put an add on craigslist asking for two - five chickens ready to lay. i got a few responces and ended up getting two rhode island reds and two black orpingtons. so far so good no eggs yet but i will keep you all up to date. thanks for reading and i look forward to getting and giving help to others via BYC thaks Gary
