As the original poster, having just completed the last step in my coop build, I will share a few other things we learnt as we went along:
- Cedar Tongue & Groove planks (left over from the covered deck project) are a great idea IN THEORY!!! Not so much in practice. They cracked often, regardless of the screw size and technique we used. Next time, ply wood all the way
- DONT buy the cheapest stick down tiles (for the coop floor) possible.....during installation they will rip and tear if you look at them the wrong way!
- Plan your nail/screw depths accordingly for all areas of the projects, this was a problem for us the WHOLE project, LOL
- Also plan your Hinges and latches better than I did! Evey hinge and latch I bought was either too big or too small for what we needed it to be, further exasperating the cracking cedar plank issue, LOL
- Make a plan for the structure, and dont veer from it!!! We changed our plan several times to ............"simplify" the project for my grumbly husband, and lost alot of function I had originally planned for out of pure lack of thinking ahead.
("Oh skip that step dear".....and then two hours later id be like "oops, now that we've skipped that, we cant do this other thing I needed" etc etc.
Overall, I think we did pretty good for two people who know nothing about carpentry and usually want to kill eachother when trying to work together, LOL
I am going to post my coop in the Coop section, and then I will come back and leave a link here.
