This isn’y the best chicken coop around. But it’s a fairly simple (and I found after I designed it, popular design). Mine is slightly different than others I’ve seen but effectively the same as some common classic designs.
It’s 10ft x 4ft and 8ft tall. The extra piece on the front there is 30in x 48in. There is a “second story” where you can see where I made some nesting boxes as well as the add-on in front. This is built to let the chickens out each morning, not for having chickens inside all day. It’s 68sq ft total and I think I could comfortably put 20+ chickens in because our pen is in the range of 1500 - 2000sq ft. Without letting them out each day though 17 is really the max to give them enough room to wander around some.
We also allow ours to range completely free occaisionally, once or twice a week.
I will in the future be changing out the mulch/wood chips in the bottom with sand which is simply a very practical bedding. Easily cleaned, doesn’t get as many pests as wood…etc. I’ve also recently pulled out the roost on the very bottom. This allows easier access to that end of the coop for the chickens which keeps them more comfortable if I’m not able to let them out until later in the day.
A proper coop is one of the most important things when having your chickens. There are two primary things you need to keep in mind when building it: make it safe, make it practical.
Keeping your chickens safe from being eaten by the huge number of things that would love to eat them can be a challenge but it’s worth the time and money invested. A couple of small holes I overlooked when building this cost me 3 chickens one night.
Lack of fore thought on how to clean up my coop cost me hours of work.
Now that I’ev figured a lot of that out, chickens really are pleasant and easy to care for. If you’d like good advice on safety and practicality talk to a small farmer who wants to make money on his eggs or chickens. This forces you to come up with many things that decrease the work load of maintenance and the likelihood of loosing them to predators.
If you keep those two things in mind, you’ll have happier chickens. Believe me, they don’t like you tearing about in their home and they like nasty things that want to eat them tearing about in their home even less.
Anyway here’s a very rough top down drawing of how it’s laid out:
Here are some other pictures of the progression as it was built.
