Ten by Ten Chicken Coop!!

[Abossyrn]

We are newbies to the back yard chickens... We have thought about raising chickens for three years now and wanted to our coop to be safe and built smart since raising chickens will be our long term chicken project.. We don't want to have to re-build our coop due to poor construction and flawed design. My husband is a General Contractor so he only will 'go big' on his home building projects.

Our coop is supported by 7 foot steel posts, set in one foot of concrete, that is four inches wide for a solid construction! This should prevent any unwanted intruders from digging under our coop and killing our beautiful Peeps! We have put together a pre-build Hen House that will sit within the 10 x 10 enclosure. This area we chose sits on the outskirts of our garden area, that will allow our Peeps a larger enclosed area to later explore when they are bigger, eat a larger selection of bugs and insects, and should help weed the garden in the non-growing months.

We'll keep you posted on our progress and let you know if we find any flaws in our design planning, and building and can share our design with others if interested!!

 

[JanetS]

Big is good. Are you going to post pictures as you go?

 

[Abossyrn]

Yes.. But I haven't figured how to upload them to this link yet! I will post as we go!! Thanks for asking..

 

[Abossyrn]

So here in picture one is the start of our 10 x 10 coop... We dug a one foot deep by four inch wide foundation: then set steel posts one foot deep for a sturdy foundation for our Peeps house.. The post you see is where we are going to put our roosting bar for the hens to perch..


1)




2)

We framed the house and roof using 2x4 and 2x6 construction with redwood, the roof has a 1:12 pitch for easy water runoff.. We applied 'Acorn Brown Thompsons Water Sealer' to all boards and edges to perserve the wood and give more years to the house. We screwed in braces at each intersection of the roof, and screwed the boards to the steel posts for durability...



3)

We put together a pre built Hen House kit by "Pro Concepts", that we picked up at Costco, and then attached a 2x4 base that we buried into the ground for stability against the back wall of the coop. We extended the roof overhang about 12 more inches to cover the access door to the egg laying boxes, which actually sits outside the coop for easier accesability and cleaning.



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We put in brackets at each rafter and then put in six mesh vents (three on each side) at each rafter along the roof line that were about 22 inches long.



5)

We sheeted the roof using three sheets of 1/2 inch plywood- that we also pre-sealed with Thompsons Water Sealer.. the roof will be covered using a composition roofing material, which we will put on later this week.



6)

The coop is nearly done.. We leveled the dirt and put in a decomposed granite walkway around the coop. We are going to use a 19 guage 1/2" mesh hardware cloth for our siding - since we have tons of squirels and also racoons, opossums and rats in our area. Today we will side it, build the door and hang it.. I will post more pictures when we are complete!!

Thanks for those who visited our coop!!
Abossyrn