Today we are getting ready to build a coop for our chickens.  Although I recommend building a coop before your chickens arrive, we have done just fine until now by keeping them in a large outdoor dog kennel.  However, we live in town and do not have many chicken predators around.  Since we need a place for our chickens to nest and roost, the definitely need a coop soon (and hopefully we won’t look like such rednecks anymore).

Our plan is to build a large garden shed that will be used as a coop.  When we sell our house, it can be used even if the next owners do not want chickens.  The shed will be 12’x8′ and will have a full sized entry door.  Here are some things we took into consideration:

1.  Chickens need about 4 square feet each inside the coop.  Since we have 16 chickens, that would mean making a 64 square foot shed.  Ours will be 96 square feet (just in case I want to add a few to my bunch).

2.  Linoleum flooring (which will be installed before the walls are put up) is easy to clean and should cover most surfaces.

3. Ventilation is extremely important and helps keep your chickens safe in the cold winters as well.  We will have vents and windows installed for this purpose.

4. We want a fixed foundation, but do not want it raised so that predators/nuisance animals can get under it.  For this purpose, we are putting down a gravel pad for our foundation to rest on.  This will also help with drainage.

5. I designed the interior of the coop around the nest boxes and roosting sites.  We will have one nest box for every 4 chickens and plenty of room for roosting (they require 8-10″ each).

6. We really want the coop to look nice without costing a lot of money.  I will go into details of our supplies in another post, but the coop will have the same siding as the house and will match the garage.

We are going to put the coop back behind the garage.  You won’t be able to see it from the road and it is in the back corner of the property (away from any neighbor’s homes). 

We will have to remove one tree before we begin, so that we can have a run come out the west side of the coop.  Other than that, we were able to dump some gravel into our 12’x8′ area.

We have just as much gravel left, and we will work on creating a level area when we start building our treated foundation.  Tomorrow we will start the building process, so check back for an update soon!