I hear Lowes and places like that carry cardboard packing boxes that come in various large sizes. Keep in mind that baby chicks DOUBLE in size every week! A smallish box the first week will seem entirely adequate, yet three weeks later, those chicks will be packed like sardines!
The beauty of cardboard boxes is that you can put them together with duct tape. You can create a chick condo of spectacular design and dimensions! And the best thing about this arrangement of boxes is you can keep adding on boxes as the chicks grow and become more active. Boxes taped together can have doorways cut into the common walls and this way multi-room condos can be created. You could even make a two-story affair if you care to get really creative!
I go nuts with my cardboard brooder condos and cut windows in them for lots of light and the chicks have the added advantage of being able to see humans walking around, therefore they're much less afraid. I cover the windows with see-through plastic.
The most important detail, though, that nobody else will probably mention is that all of these boxes should have SIDE accesses. Why not just reach in from the top like everyone else does with their brooders? Because baby chicks have an instinctive fear of anything coming at them from above. It's in their DNA to fear danger from the sky, and every week they are grabbed at from the top of a brooder box, they become more skittish and fearful of being handled.
By contrast, chicks handled carefully from the side, are calm and trusting of humans from the very first day and grow into calm and trusting adult chickens, easy to handle and a joy if you feel like making pets out of any of them. Either way, they'll be much easier to handle as grown chickens than chicks raised in brooders with a top access and grabbed from above.
If you have card tables, you can put each box on its own stand and really make it easy on your back when you need to handle the chicks or clean the brooder. I pull a chair up and sit in perfect comfort when I play with my chicks, give them treats, or tidy up.
You can't do all that with plastic tote bins. And it's much, much cheaper! If you hound an appliance store for discarded shipping boxes, you can have them for nothing!
