Pre-Fab Vs. Scratch

[ChikinInThePines]

Hey everyone!
My fiance and I are pretty serious about raising some chickens for fresh eggs. Our schedules work out very nicely to where we can let the chickens free range while we’re home.
The biggest issue/question we have been brainstorming is buying a pre-fab coop or building from scratch. Now I will say that I am relatively handy, but my strong suit is not in wood working…So we started looking at Pre-Fabs. I was surprised to see the price of some of these! It may be cheaper to scratch build after all. We are looking to only have about 5 to 6 chickens (not many). I was wondering if anyone had ideas or links to good coops?

 

[nuthatched]

Hi, 95% of prefabs or cheaply made yet terribly expensive, they also like space, security and durability. You can use them with....adjustments.
At the top of the page, you'll see a tab marked 'articles' (it's a picture of a page on mobile), there's a section in there on coops, designed and built by chicken people. ;]

 

[mamajos]

https://www.backyardchickens.com/articles/categories/chicken-coops.12/

 

[RosemaryDuck]

Honestly, you'll probably spend a lot more on building it yourself but it's worth every single penny.

Pre fabs last about a year (if that) before they pretty much disintegrate. They're very cheap and held together by almost nothing.

I built a duck coop for about $280-300. It's extremely sturdy & has everything I wanted. Plus if anything breaks I can very easily replace it/fix it, and not have to wait for parts or pieces.

Definitely build it yourself if you can! Best of luck to you.

 

[Shezadandy]

Hey everyone!
My fiance and I are pretty serious about raising some chickens for fresh eggs. Our schedules work out very nicely to where we can let the chickens free range while we’re home.
The biggest issue/question we have been brainstorming is buying a pre-fab coop or building from scratch. Now I will say that I am relatively handy, but my strong suit is not in wood working…So we started looking at Pre-Fabs. I was surprised to see the price of some of these! It may be cheaper to scratch build after all. We are looking to only have about 5 to 6 chickens (not many). I was wondering if anyone had ideas or links to good coops?

I highly recommend building the biggest one your local regulations will allow - chicken math gets us all and there's nothing more frustrating than a coop that ends up being too small. As a bonus, if you ever sell - a nice coop can be a good selling feature, but one that can be used for a shed by the next person is good too!

What we did for our first one is bought a shed kit and then customized it. We used 23/32" plywood for the floor because once it's built, that's IT. To protect the plywood and make for easy cleaning and odor control, we covered that with 3/4" horse stall mats. Then the walls are built up on top of the horse stall mats (which takes extra long screws) and incorporated into the building. The most important thing we did to the shed kit was increase the size of the roof. We made the eave overhang much longer - protects the sidewalls - and extended it out 3 feet to make a spot we could stand while opening and closing the door to stay dry.

We added windows, an automatic door for the chickens, we repurposed the door it came with as a ramp - and used a metal screen door, like the kind you'd see on a house front door - to improve ventilation - and we put a poultry exhaust fan on the opposite wall from the screen door - works great. Course, the fan only works if you've got a power source to plug it in.

So as a time saver and not having to cut all the lumber - angled rafters etc - a shed kit is a very decent place to start and adds value to the property.

Whatever the price of the shed kit, make sure you know what it comes with. Many will give you the frame (which we beefed up with additional 2x4s on 12" centers) but not the plywood that will become the floor. Additional costs like paint, whatever you do for the roof, whether you use the hardware it comes with (we used T-25 screws of varying lengths instead of nails, VERY hard to strip them- and I'm just not accurate enough with a hammer) - and of course windows!!! will add to the cost.

Ventilation is key. Ridge vents, eave vents, windows etc all are very important - and this goes for little prefab chicken coops too, ESPECIALLY in warm weather. They might have those cute little holes - but it's not enough. I've looked at those many times at the farm supply stores- and then I look at a shed- many are set up in building supply parking lots. I like being able to walk into my coops for lots of reasons.

Deciding whether you're going to do a raised foundation or doing a cement slab will factor into the cost of the shed too. We did ours as a raised foundation to keep it out of the mud.

 

[DobieLover]

Hey everyone!
My fiance and I are pretty serious about raising some chickens for fresh eggs. Our schedules work out very nicely to where we can let the chickens free range while we’re home.
The biggest issue/question we have been brainstorming is buying a pre-fab coop or building from scratch. Now I will say that I am relatively handy, but my strong suit is not in wood working…So we started looking at Pre-Fabs. I was surprised to see the price of some of these! It may be cheaper to scratch build after all. We are looking to only have about 5 to 6 chickens (not many). I was wondering if anyone had ideas or links to good coops?

DO NOT go pre-fab!! They are so poorly constructed and designed and to get one properly designed for a flock of 5-6 (which is where you want to start but is not where you will end up, trust me), the cost would be very high and it would be cheaper to build from scratch.
BUT, you don't have to build from scratch. Start looking for a used shed to convert into a coop. Or you could buy a new shed kit but building a shed really isn't that hard for someone that is handy.
You can make a crappy old shed into a cute coop:

Obviously, mine is built for my obsession level. But you can find a smaller shed, like an 8x8 and split it for storage in one part, the coop in the other.
Shoot for 4 sq feet of space per bird with one linear foot of roost space per bird.
I extended the roof line, added soffit, ridge and gable vents, reframed for salvage windows and a human access door (I found for free), added nest boxes, a built-in brooder, two pop doors and poop boards with roosts running down the middle with a total of 25' of roost space. I have 14.5 sq feet of permanently open ventilation and also leave two windows away from the roosts cracked open for more fresh air year round.

During the summer all the windows around the roost are left fully open.

 

[3KillerBs]

Welcome to BYC. Where, in general, are you? Climate matters, particularly when it comes to housing.

Rules of Thumb

• If it looks like a dollhouse it's only suitable for toy chickens.
• If it's measured in inches instead of feet it's too small.
• If your walk-in closet is larger than the coop-run combo you're thinking of buying think carefully about whether you have an utterly awesome closet or are looking at a seriously undersized chicken coop.
• If it has more nestboxes than the number of chickens it can legitimately hold the designer knew nothing about chickens' actual needs and it probably has other design flaws too.

The Usual Guidelines

For each adult, standard-sized hen you need:

• 4 square feet in the coop (.37 square meters)
• 10 square feet in the run (.93 square meters),
• 1 linear foot of roost (3 meters),
• 1/4 of a nest box,
• And 1 square foot (.09) of permanent, 24/7/365 ventilation, preferably located over the birds' heads when they're sitting on the roost.

IMO, no coop intended for long-term chicken housing should ever be smaller than a 4-foot (1.2-meter), cube -- which suits 4 chickens (look at my Little Monitor Coop to see how the measurements all stack up).

For 6 chickens you need:

• 24 square feet in the coop. 4'x6' is the only really practical build for this given the common dimensions of lumber. If you can't walk into it, put the access door in the middle of the long side to make sure you can reach all areas of the coop because a stubborn chicken WILL press itself into/lay an egg in the back corner where you can't reach.
• 6 feet of roost
• 60 square feet in the run. 6'x10' or 8'x8'.
• 6 square feet of ventilation.
• 2 nest boxes, to give the hens a choice

Here's a great article explaining why these guidelines are *guidelines*, not hard-and-fast rules: https://www.backyardchickens.com/articles/how-much-room-do-chickens-need.66180/

 

[Ursuline Chick]

Welcome from New Orleans. Wow, you have gotten some of the best information, and I can't think of much to add. Except, perhaps to make sure you read the suggested articles. With chickens, bigger is always better. Good Luck with your project.

 

[Shezadandy]

Very much like @DobieLover we started with a scary old shed and reused what we could.

Doesn't look TOO bad, right?

This was the foundation after we took it apart. No, I didn't do anything to it. This was the actual foundation they built this shed on!!! Notice you can't even see the front floor frame piece...

Here was underneath the shed at the front when it still had the plywood floor attached.

We kept what we affectionately referred to as the "roof ribs", expanded it from an 8x8 to an 8x12, and of course rebuilt the foundation.

With the horse stall mats (4 4ftx6ft 3/4" mats) over the plywood floor (different building but same exact setup)

Eventually (and painfully, as it would have been SO much easier to build the darn thing with the exhaust fan in place originally) we put a 24" poultry exhaust fan across from the metal screen door, and added 4 roof vents. We got the fan here- it is made for the abuse of dust-heavy environments unlike most fans. Attic fans will explicitly state to not use in the presence of poultry. Took us a while to find these and we love them. (https://www.valleyvet.com/ct_detail.html?pgguid=D74B298D-3C6F-4287-9F9F-4EA09B8D0A73)

On the "If I was going to do this again" side - I would not use such a short-walled version of a gambrel roof for a chicken coop. The side walls were only 4 feet, which meant on the inside, the roosts were all higher than all the windows. The roof being set up on 2x4s added to the exterior of the the "roof ribs" added some ventilation front to back - but the exhaust fan and metal screen door combination are what saved it.

We have since moved and our new coop involved lots of learning from the old coop's mistakes - doing a ridgeline roof vent instead, much taller sidewalls so the windows were at roost level - while keeping the things that we liked such as the door/exhaust fan combo.

 

[mrtoren]

Most pre-fabs are junk. They're targeted at beginners who don't know any better. They're frequently undersized, poorly designed, and use inferior soft woods. You'll be lucky to get a year out of it before it starts wobbling or breaks.

I thought it would be cheaper to build my own as well. Ultimately, cost creep will catch up with you (especially if you do it right). I built a tank of a coop and I think I spent about $400 in materials when everything was done. No sense in spending $300-500 on a pre-fab and another $400-500 to replace it the following year.