- May 7, 2014
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We live in Calvert County, Maryland on about 3 acres of wooded land. We have been working on living a more self sufficient lifestyle and enjoy growing our own food and buying our meat from local farms. After a few lengthy conversations, we decided to give chickens a go. My spouse and I both work professional jobs, so time is a premium and that was a factor in our decision making process. We decided on a small flock of 8-12 layers and started with 4 Australorp and 4 Rhode Island Red.
We opted for flexibility and built a shed. This way, if we change our minds later and stop raising chickens, we'll still have useable space for storage.
This is a pic of the 8x8 shed we built from scratch. I found plans at mybackyardplans.com and we built the 8x8 gable shed. I lifted it on 4x4 posts for some run space underneath. We added a 8x8 hoop run to the side to keep the hawks and eagles from the birds as well as foxes and racoon. We're still tweaking things out, but it's been a fun project. I'd guess we have about $1200 in the entire project at this point. We added the wire mesh over the run today. I still need to add the nesting boxes and configure a door into the run. We've been free ranging the birds while we're home on the weekends, so they get out and about when we can watch them.
Another weekend or 2 and we'll be all finished up. Looking forward to fresh eggs in a few more weeks!
We read a lot of great information from the forums here and it's been very helpful, so thanks to the community.
We opted for flexibility and built a shed. This way, if we change our minds later and stop raising chickens, we'll still have useable space for storage.
This is a pic of the 8x8 shed we built from scratch. I found plans at mybackyardplans.com and we built the 8x8 gable shed. I lifted it on 4x4 posts for some run space underneath. We added a 8x8 hoop run to the side to keep the hawks and eagles from the birds as well as foxes and racoon. We're still tweaking things out, but it's been a fun project. I'd guess we have about $1200 in the entire project at this point. We added the wire mesh over the run today. I still need to add the nesting boxes and configure a door into the run. We've been free ranging the birds while we're home on the weekends, so they get out and about when we can watch them.
Another weekend or 2 and we'll be all finished up. Looking forward to fresh eggs in a few more weeks!
We read a lot of great information from the forums here and it's been very helpful, so thanks to the community.
