Always thought a guy could buy up the old chicken supplies and sell them to the hipsters at a sweet profit.

I got a roto-tiller attachment for free on Craigslist for my weed eater , gave it to my neighbor for use in his chicken pen (with dirt floor) greatest thing ever for that use as the chickens poop and it turns to cement. He uses it to churn the dirt over so they can scratch. Can't do that with a normal roto-tiller as it is a too tight an area. Great use for it.

Also , I've learned how to sex 'straight run' chicks at most garden supply places to properly sex pullets VS cocks and hens at places like Tractor Supply. You can reject cocks at the 'straight run' price if they let you. Not bad for someone labeled 'city folk' , a good skill worth learning.

Here is our coop, white oak board sawed on our sawmill, still have to build the run right now we just let them out to free range and put them up at night

Beautiful coop, Mike.

Thanks, it’s sure nice to have fresh eggs

I miss that. I will have chickens next year.

Thats a nice one Mike 77

what type of wood/ siding did you use? That looks like a great setup.

Good Job! And just like that your a chicken farmer!! You’ll be pleased when the eggs start rolling in! I haven’t done meat chickens since i was a kid and i still don’t miss the smell of soaking them in the hot water before plucking! You get a nice skillet full of fried chicken though and you’ll forget all about it!!

Our set up. 8x16 coop, run is about 20x30. Room for feed and bedding on 1/3, you won't want that feed and grain in your garage or fur shed, it's a rodent magnet. 9 two year old Hens and 20 one year olds and one busy rooster. Ours are free range during the day, lost one to a hawk and two to sickness the first year after I got old straw from a neighbor that turned out to be full of bugs from barn pigeons. Lesson learned.

Looks very good. Assuming the front faces south, what you have is about 90% aligned with the old Fool Proof house I referenced way back in the thread.

Some notes of interest.........chickens create a lot of humidity and moisture just by their existence. Through their breath and droppings. Too much and they start getting respiratory ailments, plus in sub freezing weather, the moisture leads to frostbite on combs and waddles. Requires ventilation. So closing up a house isn't good...moisture and ammonia from droppings are both bad news. Assuming those windows face south, winter sun will follow the roof line all the way to the back of the house, meaning well lite.....warmer, dryer and UV from the sun helps with bugs and pathogens. Summer sun is directly above......so roof overhangs shade windows to keep things cooler. So good job on number and orientation of the windows, and vents up high (always open). And if openings face south, house was placed on a south facing slope, which is always warmer in winter. And drier. And protected from brutal north winter winds.

Metal next boxes.....aside from being the right size, number is to be about 4 birds per box. Hidden varmints include mites and lice.....and metal is easier to clean up than wood, which has cracks. And you are right about the rodents. Chickens are rodent magnets. Rats being the worst. Easier to prevent than to eradicate.

A buddy and I built the coop based on a photo my wife liked so we might have lucked into some of the features. The big windows face south and I leave them open night and day once the weather warms up. Soffit vents on front and back overhangs and slots near the top on each side. We open the side windows, it is closed in the photo because we had rain last night, get a great crosswind for ventilation. Our coop is pretty exposed on the hill though with one shade tree that helps in the summer. No insulation, no extra light and no heat except for a plug in water heater in the winter. Egg production does drop way off in the winter because of the short days but still get enough for us to use. Overload on eggs right now though!

Just got home from the lumber yard. Will see how this goes. Will try to update with pictures as this progress's.

In the chick - pullet coop Which I got free...on the wood floor I stapled down chicken wire before overlaying with new floor.... vermin wont get in that way.

Hey, Rockfarmer! These are always fun threads to look at. I was going to post on this earlier, and I hoped I could find one of my old posts about coops and copy it here, but I guess it’s been too long and I couldn’t find them. Anyway, our girls have it pretty good and we’ve learned a lot along the way - not always by doing everything right.

Our coop is elevated and has a wood floor. We use the deep litter method with pine shavings and it works beautifully. Our coop is only 4’ x 8’. We built our coop for 6-8 hens and it would be just fine if it was a little bigger and had a higher ceiling. Bigger would be nice because it really helps to be set up so you can divide the coop temporarily when adding newer, younger pullets. We divide ours at those times, but it’s really tight. (If you raise chickens to butcher them all and then start over, this is not an issue. Ours have pet status, so when we get down to only a few, we get new chicks and integrate them.) A higher ceiling would be nice so when I need to do work in the coop for any length of time, it really helps to be able to stand up straight! Our coop is insulated, and more importantly, it has good ventilation – way more important than warmth. Always lean towards fresh, clean air over heat.

We have four nest boxes (more than needed), and they definitely have curtains! I did an experiment with that a long time ago and put curtains on two of the four. Given the choice, the girls would only lay eggs in the nests with curtains. They like the security of feeling that their eggs are hidden. I then put curtains on all four boxes. Their roosts are 2” x 3” boards, but any dimensional lumber with a wider flat side is best for them so they can set their fat bellies on their feet in winter. They don’t have particularly strong feet and are really most comfortable on a flat roost. Bigger natural branches are nice too, but round dowels are tough for them to hold on to and don’t allow them to toast their little feet. (Okay, big feet.)

I have used all kinds of waterers and the only ones I will use now are the Farm Innovations poultry fountains (mentioned on another thread) because they stay warm in winter, they fill from the top, they don’t have a tray and that keeps the water perfectly clean inside down to the last drop, which results in much healthier hens and waaaaaaaay less work for me!

We have an automatic stainless steel door that opens on a timer and closes on a light sensor. The girls have a radio that comes on with their lights on a timer. They enjoy bluegrass, country or classical music. (We don’t allow them to listen to any hard rock or anything inappropriate for them.) We have a few thermostatically controlled outlets. I plug in a Sweeter Heater in one area during the winter in case any of the little beauty queens wants to warm her back. I make sure not to heat the whole coop so they have a choice if they want to sleep under it or not. It is surprising how often they don’t choose the heat. I reverse the function on one of the outlets so I can plug in an exhaust fan to come on in the summer if it gets really warm. Since so many people on here already know this, I will now have to admit that during one or two extremely hot summers, I attached a tiny window air conditioner to one of their windows for the hottest few days. Okay, laugh all you want - our girls were the only hens laying in the area!

The girls free range by day, but they have a 10 foot run with a roof so they can hang out there during rough storms or right before they go inside in the evening – or if we’re gone and we don’t let them out. They run around in the woods by the coop and the house and follow us around. They sit on our laps when they get a chance. When they free range, their eggs get richer and better and the yolks are darker orange. Great stuff. They come up to the house and hang out under the porches, and they show up and look in the screened door when they hear us nearby. In winter, they march through the (shallow) snow to come over to the house. (Zim plows them a path if it gets deep!)

The girls are patriotic, so they have an American flag, and Zim added a little window box so they could have some flowers outside. They appreciate that.

It should be obvious at this point that I have pet hens with names (yeah, I know). One year I did go get a bunch of meat chickens - Jumbo Cornish Crosses – and raised them up and butchered them just to prove to my neighbors that I’m not a complete idiot. I kept them in a separate pen. The girls were not allowed to meet those boys or witness the whole butchering operation. Those boys were delicious.

Anyway, we have been through some hens since 2007. We’ve learned a lot and they stick around much longer now. Between cleaner air and water and some tricks with some great products (food grade diatomaceous earth and Oxine AH), they live longer, healthier lives, make more eggs and smile a lot. Our Buff Orpington will be nine years old in May and she’s in better shape this year than ever. After a winter break, she started laying again on March 1st.

Here are some photos from over the years.














I hope you have fun with your chickens. You'll get a lot of good advice and great ideas on this site!

You spoil them girls they are luck.

A couple of features that i really like about our coop is the outside run is divided so on the years we get new chicks they live in the back section that you can see with the little coop until there big enough to go with the adult birds. Then the first pic inside is an area where we keep tools, food, etc. You can also see where the eggs end up. Last you can see the roost, i’ve got it hinged on the wall so you just pick it up over your head and latch it to the ceiling so i can get under it to clean up. Also the coop is insulated, i’ve got the heat lamp that shines on the water during the day when the coop is open. At night when we shut the coop up we turn the lamp off and it stays above freezing unless it gets really really cold. I don’t like to give them light 24hrs so we turn the lamp off at night.

That divided area is nice, Keystone. That's one of the problems with the size of our coop and integrating new little ones. We do divide the coop, but we just barely pull it off.

Due to our undersized coop, we don't add any little ones unless we're down to 2 or 3 adults. Then we'll get a few chicks. We raise those in our brood pen in the house until they're fully feathered before they make the move outside to the coop.






This shows the coop with two runs when it's divided, so the little ones come and go from the left side of the coop into their own little run, and the big ones go out the right side to roam freely as they please. When they're all back in the coop, it is divided and they can see each other through the divider.







While it was divided, I moved nest boxes to the big girls' section on the right.



For anyone new to integrating young chickens into an existing adult population, that's really key to having them get along. If they see and get used to each other for a while when the older ones can't pick on the little ones, everything goes much more smoothly when you pull out the divider and allow them to mix. As far as they're concerned, they were already roosting in the same coop every night for a while. Squabbles are kept at a minimum. Integration day was hilarious and without incident. The little ones discovered they could free range, but stuck closer to the coop. After a few days, they stuck close to the bigger girls all day.

If we had it to do all over again, we would make the coop a few feet bigger with a removable dividing wall and a higher ceiling so we could easily stand up in there. Besides being easier to manage, more space and fresh air per bird makes healthier birds too. Now that we have this situation working as well as it can with the space we have, we'll stick with it for a while. The day we get down to three hens we'll think about getting chicks the following spring. That used to happen often enough, but the girls have been healthier and healthier over the years as I've learned some valuable lessons, and it's taking a long time to reach that point. We have been hovering at four hens for three years now (with Daisy turning nine this spring) and all four are laying, which is nice to keep Zim and I in eggs!

I could go on about the things we've learned, Rockfarmer. We're truly small potatoes here, but I have some useful tricks that have made a night and day difference in our chickens. For anyone keeping chickens (and numerous other farm animals and pets as well) who is not familiar with Oxine AH (non-activated form - NO citric acid) and food grade diatomaceous earth, those products are both game changers. The other day, I dug through a tote with piles of past chicken "supplies" that used to include all kinds of remedies and antibiotics and things I would use to try to save a chicken with sour crop or a respiratory infection, etc. That used to be common here, but now it's been a long time since I even thought about those things!

Hopefully some of this is helpful. I do know that you'll get a real kick out of the whole experience!

Great information and pictures! Really appreciate it! construction starts tomorrow.

Good luck, Rockfarmer. Keep us up to date on your progress!