Nesting boxes made from removable dish bins?

[gtaus]

For those of you who wanted pics....

Here is a shot of the side of my mobile coop. You see the 24X36 sliding window and underneath is my outside access door to my internal nesting boxes.

Here is the same shot but with the access door down, showing the inside nesting boxes.

Finally, a shot of the dish pan nest boxes from inside the coop. My girls still have a few months before they start laying, so I just put in the dish bins for the picture. I don't want them thinking this is a place to sleep, so I took the bins out after the picture and won't put them back in for a few months.

And a little closer...

The nest boxes are 12 inches off the bottom of the floor and about 16 inches to the top of the dish bin. I have about 4 inches of deep litter in there right now. The deep litter portion was designed to be as deep as 12 inches, which would make the bottom of the nesting box almost at bedding level. My roosting bars are 24 inches and 48 inches from the bottom of the floor, so I hope the girls will chose to sleep on the roosting bars and not in the nesting boxes.

Any comments welcomed. Thanks.

 

[Celticdragonfly]

If they fit and hold up to it, that sounds like a very clever idea to me. My pullets aren't laying yet, so I don't know how much of a mess you tend to get in nest boxes. We just have the commercial nest pads in there, and they go in occasionally and poop some so we've replaced the pads.

 

[Aunt Angus]

I've seen great nesting boxes made this way! I used file crates until I decided to male external boxes to free up room in my coop.

I did read about a person who used the plastic bins and didn't secure them well, so the chickens would tip them over if they jumped on them a certain way. But your rail system sounds like it will prevent that from happening.

Be sure to post pics when you're done!!! Sounds like it's going to be awesome!

 

[Aunt Angus]

View attachment 1832982

See? It IS awesome!!!

Nice set up!

 

[gtaus]

View attachment 1832982

Very nice. I'm thinking something similar but only 3 bins and open in the back because I have an access door built into the wall.

 

[Taj_MaChicken]

I originally bought cheap kitty litter pans to do this with, but my boyfriend opted to buy nesting boxes instead of building.

I may keep them for the duck house.

Following

 

[Taj_MaChicken]

I don't have cats, but I do have some kitty litter pans which I find useful for lots of things. The kitty litter pans I have are only about half as deep as the plastic dish bins I intend to use as nest boxes, so I think the bins will be better.

I considered buying premade nesting boxes, but at $20 each for a plastic shell that gets screwed into the wall, I could not see the advantage of the premade box over making a removable nest box with the plastic dish bins. Well, I guess it's easier to just screw in the plastic premade nest box to the wall, and easy to relocate later if you want. So maybe your boyfriend thought that was a better solution for your coop.

I bought some nice rubber feeding pans for my chickens, but you could use the kitty litter pans as feeding pans. When I feed kitchen scraps to the chicks, I always put them in my feeding pan. What the chickens don't eat from the feeding pan, I carry out to the compost bin the next day. Much easier than trying to clean up the scraps from the ground. I don't want to leave rotting food around the coop/run to attract predators like skunks and raccoons. So confining the scraps to the feeding pans make my life easier.

After building the coop, he was done with building anything lol. We bought a house when we got ducks. He wanted something easy for the nesting boxes, that's all.

 

[gtaus]

I love the bins. My big coop has normal sized birds so will be keeping their bins.

Good to know. My chickens are normal sized so I think they will be fine in the plastic bins.

 

[aart]

Looking forward to seeing your design and build.
From what I've seen bins/totes need to be stable from 'edge stepping' but still easily removable by keeper for cleaning or moving a broody.

 

[Sunshine Flock]

I'm not at all a fan of plastic. Some outgass strongly and take a long time for this process to diminish. Plastics contain estrogenic chemicals, even ones that are labeled BPA-free. I don't trust them even a little.

And eventually the only thing they're good for is the landfill, and that's never a good option.

Also, as mentioned, plastic is slippery. I've seen chicks slip and their legs slide apart, putting them in jeopardy of an injury. Full grown chickens are at risk, too.

I realize tons of people use plastic for feeders, waterers and nesting boxes. But I really take issue with our dependency on this material. We choose it for ease of use. It comes with a heavy footprint, though. When you buy plastic, even with a high recycled content, there's no escaping where it came from, what it contains and what's yet to be discovered about the harmful consequences to our health, and where it ends up when its convenience has run its course and we dispose of it.

Just my twenty thousand cents on the matter.

(ETA: I wanted to mention that I started a discussion on my Brinsea heater that's no longer working properly. It's made of plastic. It's really hard getting away from this material, and I did contemplate PVC feeders at one point. But I say no to plastics as much as possible.)