New Coop Going up this summer

[Ryedale]

Summer 2009... Pretty much have spent over 100 hrs to get to this point (in the lower pics) My own fault for wanting the hip roof

It does look good though and I'm happy with construction so far. The 12x12 size will allow us to have a small "vestibule" to harvest the eggs from the clean or "man" side of the interior wall. No poo on the shoe.
Found this nice old Jamesway nest box. It was a 15 hole but have cut it down to a 10, as the lower 5 were pretty rotted/rusted out. Used some zinc primer, and silver paint. I like the neat old round hole nest boxes. I'm sure this one is from the 50's or 60's. It had $23.14 written in pencil on the side of it. Probably from an old hardware store many years ago.
It cleaned up nice. Chickens are still in a temporary pen, hardly want to move them in. I've talked to them and they have agreed not to poo on the floor.

 

[davidr]

Excellent work on the hip. Those kinds of cuts are far beyond my skills.

David

 

[Ryedale]

Quote:
Thanks David,
I'm not a carpenter by trade, but I found a great website with a hip roof calculator www.blocklayer.com and I basicly used their program to design the roof. Even with the cheat sheet it took a long time to cut all the angles, and the birdsmouths. There are no more than 4 members in the whole roof that are the same. Took many evenings to prep the boards, but they went up rather fast.

 

[CityChook]

Beautiful, beautiful coop. It takes *forever* to build when you do it *right.* But it's always worth it in the end. Please keep us updated. I will watch this one with anticipation.

And

from MN

 

[Ryedale]

Quote:
Thanks CityChook....
I wanted to mention that some of the reasoning for doing a hip is to have natural equal ventilation. I left the top 2'x2' open stud at the peak, and I'm putting in a coupula for good venting. I'll try to get some more pics as it progresses.

Any tips are surely welcome.

 

[Jermbubba]

wow! the mother of all coops! well done so far

 

[ducks4you]

First,

Love the room inside for the birds. Love the roof--YOU do, too, judging from the number of angles of pics of JUST the roof!

Thanks for the link to :http://www.blocklayer.com/

I've bookmarked it for future reference. Keep us posted on your progress!

 

[Mahonri]

Wow.... looking good.

 

[Ryedale]

Quote:
Ha Ha....you got me...
My love for hip roofs started when I saw those 1960's contemporary ranch homes with the nice roof lines, and all the brick work. I'm just so happy that I was able to self teach and after the number of hours i put into it, I'll admit, I'm pretty thrilled with it.
I decide to go bigger with my coop because we don't have a huge permanant run, but also wanted to have enough chickens to produce at least a dozen eggs a day to be able to sell some and possibly cover the food. I figured with a large comfortable coop, we could manage them easier if we have to have somebody watch them too, perhaps not letting them out each day while we are gone. I dam near don't want the chickens to go into it, because it's such a cozy little space now. we had 4 people in there tonight and it still seemed really large inside. The center point on the roof is around 9 feet on the inside of the room.
We have really come to like the chickens more than I thought was possible. Our Speckeled Sussex hens are quite friendly, and allow us to pick them up and seem to like the attention. They are also somehow relaxing to sit and listen, and watch them peck around the run. They make a funny cluck sound when it's bed time, and they all make their way to the temporary coop. They are certainly ready for the bigger coop though. We have 39 still and are likely going to thin down to 15 to 20 total.

 

[Zahboo]