Coop building

July 06, 2014

So, this blog starts off with chickens, but before we got them, we had to build a coop!

We anticipated only having 2 chickens (that changed quickly, but more on that later), so a small coop with an attached nesting box was designed to fit in at the bottom of the garden, under the shade of a gum tree.

So here was the base frame

Then the nesting box and the back and sides were added and a plastic corrugated roof added. At this stage, it was then moved in place under the gum tree. The doors were then added.

I used whatever scrap piece of wood I had, hence all the messy joins (if I did this again, I would have put the joints on the outside to make cleaning the coop easier). Leftover lino went into the base.

Coop inspector. You can also see version one of the perch. I didn't know how big the chickens were going to be >.<

Fencing then went up. Polypipe to hold it up and aluminium fence posts for the other. Concrete corrodes aluminium, especially in exposed (wet) conditions. To prevent this, I just spray painted the sections of the posts that would come into contact with the concrete.

$5 cat boxes went into the nesting box. A plywood divider would then later be set between them. Second version of the perch just ended up being a single piece of wood about 40-50mm wide and pretty much ran the length of the coop

First Chicken! An ISA Brown, bought for $15

We got her in the evening, so she spent the night shut up in the coop, before being let out into the run the next day.

And the first thing she did, was have a dust bath. She was still quite a few weeks away from laying, and she looked lonely. So the next week, we were off to get a plymouth rock