A chicken coop is a perfectly enabled place for chickens to live, which can be raised to lay eggs and enjoy them in a respectful way with the inhabitants.
It may be that for whatever reason you have got some hens to raise, either by inheritance, as gifts or that you have simply decided to buy them. A chicken obviously cannot be brought into the house; therefore, you need to build a chicken coop perfectly equipped for this task.
The bad thing is that if it is the first time that you are dealing with farm animals, you may not know very well how to build a chicken coop, since it is not something that they teach us in school.
A chicken coop must have everything necessary for raising chickens, that is, a place for them to eat, a cage so they do not escape, enough space for them to live well and it must be placed in a stable way in your garden or farm, to prevent it from falling.
It must also be made of more or less resistant materials, otherwise it will fall to anything that rains snows or there is a meteorological catastrophe. The good news is that it is not too expensive to build a homemade chicken coop and it is not too laborious either, because with some basic DIY skills, anyone can build their own chicken coop quickly and easily.
We are going to teach you step by step how to build your own chicken breeding place, so that you can start raising your own chickens in a healthy and natural way.
What do you need to make a chicken coop?
- A place to build a chicken coop, such as a farm or a garden.
- Chickens.
- A latch…
- Straw.
- A chain mail for the cage.
- Knowledge of architecture or hire an architect.
- Wood.
- Screws and drill.
- Basic knowledge of DIY.
Instructions for making a chicken coop
- Design of the plans of the chicken coop: When designing the plans, several things must be taken into account. The first thing is that we must take into account the number of hens that we have, since it is not the same to make a chicken coop for two hens than to make it for 28 hens, therefore, it is the first thing that we must take into account. Then you have to put in the chicken coop everything necessary for the hens to be healthy, such as an area with straw for the eggs, a place for food, some windows for ventilation and some cleaning system in which we can clean the chicken coop perfectly. Once we have the plan designed (better by an architect), bounded and it is a realistic design, we can start building.
- Building the chicken coop: Once we have it designed, it is time to start building our chicken coop, which must be perfectly adapted to what we have put on the plan. Normally the walls and the roof are simply built with wood, as if it were a wardrobe, so take the wooden planks, the drill and the screws and get to work. The roof must be triangular, so that the rainwater filters, we can use tiles but with wood it will be more than enough. Inside we are going to build the areas for the chickens, separating the chicken coop into sections, one for the nests and another for the food. If you have many hens, divide the areas into partitions, one for each hen. Also try to make some type of door so that the hens can enter and leave (with a latch if you don’t want them to leave when they don’t want them to leave) and some adapted place so that you can enter to clean.
- Extra areas: If you have space in the garden, you can set up a cage next to the chicken coop, so that the hens go out to get some air and do not escape. There you can enable an area to feed the chickens and for them to run around. You can also do some kind of extra decoration for your chicken coop, such as putting a part with sheet metal so that it does not get cold, or painting it to make it more beautiful.
Tips for making a chicken coop
- Buy a chicken coop: If you are not good with DIY or you have tried to make tutorials like this one and you have not been able to with them, do not despair, because for a relatively cheap price, you can buy a chicken coop already built, which will be ready for use without having to do anything more than transport it. The price is higher than that of the chicken coop that you can make yourself, however, you are also guaranteeing that everything will go well and that there will be no type of accident. I recommend buying a chicken coop to those who do not want to risk doing the DIY work wrong.
