- Thread starter
- #371
That's awesome if you can get free lumber. I wish I knew of such a place. You need to post pictures when you're done. I am fighting with myself between building a new chicken coop next year or buying a couple that are the sizes I need. I can't build things to save my life so having the coop built would require my husband and hopefully my dad. lightchick do you free range your chickens or are they kept in a pen? I will say if you figure out the amount of chickens you want and then build to house maybe only two or three more over that it helps with not getting completely carried away. I would have loved to order about 3 or 4 more chicks for this year but then I think they would just be a tad to squished together in the coop and run. I may be wrong but my run can hold 14 chickens and the coop is about the same, but why stretch it to the max when I can give my current chickens just a little bit more room. I have a friend who also owns chickens, she has told me a couple of times she would love to get a few more also, but her coop is already filled to the max. I know people on here say build as big as you can you are going to want to keep buying chickens, but if you build only slightly bigger than the amount you want to own you don't have to deal with feeding way more birds than you expected to have in the first place. I guess it all depends on how you are at controlling yourself also. I know right now with my 11 birds I go through a 50lb bag of feed every 4-6 weeks. Now 6 of those birds are only 5 weeks so I'm expecting how long the feed lasts to go down quite a bit when they are fully grown and I know they will eat more in the winter. It also helps though that I give my bigger 5 girls fruit and veggie scraps every other day or so. They pretty much get anything that is in our fridge that we won't eat before it goes bad or it's about to go bad. I just use a pie tin and put it all in there. It is never over flowing and they have access to the run from about 8 in the morning until 8 at night when they get shut in. Wow, now that I read back on this I got way off topic. But again it is awesome that you can get free lumber.
