From chicken coop to chicken palace (pdf with notes)

From Chicken Coop to
Chicken Palace
@timoreilly
East Bay Mini Maker Faire
October 20, 2013

Saturday, October 26, 13

How many of you have backyard chickens? How many would like to?
This talk will show off my new chicken coop, and explore some of the things I learned in building it.

Our Old Coop


Let me start with our old coop.


Here is our old coop. It was really quite adequate as long as we let the chickens roam the yard.
The enclosed wooden part is the coop proper. The enclosed wire area is referred to as the run.
Well trained chickens can be let out during the day, and whenever it gets to be dusk, they will go in like clockwork.
You can then lock them up to protect them from predators.
Jen’s chickens were not well-trained. When I ﬁrst came to live with Jen, the chickens lived outside, and roosted in
the trees at night. We tried to get them to roost in the coop, but they just wouldn’t. Every once in a while, we’d
hear a death squall in the night as a raccoon got one.


You can see how there is a locking hasp on the door.


During the day, we’d just leave the door open so they could come in to lay eggs and get to their food and water.
The rest of the time they’d be out in the yard.
I should note that there are some downsides to free-range chickens. You have to fence off a lot of your garden especially any vegetables - or they will eat everything.
If we ever went away for a few days, we could generally get the chickens into the coop by waiting to put out their
food, and locking them all up when they went in for it.
The run (the wire enclosure outside the coop proper) is big enough for a few days, but it seemed awfully small if
we were gone for more than that, so we always felt bad leaving them locked up.
But what really convinced us we needed a bigger run, so that we could leave them inside all the time, was that
they started to go after the lawn. We couldn’t fence that off, and once it started to turn into a mud ﬁeld, we
decided that we really had to build something bigger.

Our Chicken Palace


So we made a run so big that we called it our chicken palace.


Here it is! Just kidding. This is the roof of the great room of the 10th century Norman keep, Ross Castle in
Killarney.


This is our chicken palace. The coop itself (the enclosed bit at the far right) is pretty much the same size as the
old one, but the run is now 250 square feet (10 by 25), and encloses an orange tree and a lime tree.


Here’s a view of the old coop and the new coop. We moved the new one to the bottom of the garden because
there are some ﬂies, and this put everything further from the house. And you can have problems with rats (more
on that later.) Also, that part of the yard was kind of scruffy, and this spiffed it up.


And through the magic of Craigslist, we were able to ﬁnd someone who wanted the old coop, and was willing to
take it down and move it to his house, as a home for his kids’ new chickens.


We had one lucky break. A massive branch fell off our oak tree right where we planned to put the new coop. If it
had happened a few weeks later, it would have smashed everything. As it was, it knocked down the old fence
(without really breaking it), making it easier for us to do our new installation!


Here’s a closer view of the end of the coop facing the house. I love the yellow door we found at Urban Ore in
Berkeley.


The chickens always used to love to root in our compost bins. But we took the old bins down to make room for
the coop, so I reconstructed a slightly smaller one inside the run, so they could continue to have access.


Here they are, looking for anything worth having.


Here’s a closer view of the trees inside the run. I love the way it makes it feel like an aviary.


Here are the two doors into the coop itself: a small one for the chickens, and a big one so we can get inside to
clean it out.


There’s also a cleanout door below. More on that later.


I put a storage shed next to the coop, which is great for bulk food storage, shavings for the nesting boxes, and all
my fertilizer and other garden supplements.


Chickens need ventilation when they are roosting at night, so it’s a good idea to have a window. (You can also
leave the door to the coop open as long as the run itself is enclosed and protected.


But you’ve got to have chicken wire behind the window, so varmints can’t get in.
You also need to line the bottom of the run with wire, so predators can’t dig underneath.


Here’s the branch inside that the chickens roost on. The sleep standing on a branch like this.
They apparently don’t like smooth poles, but they are ﬁne with 2x4s, as you’ll see in a moment.


Part of the run outside the coop is roofed with translucent rooﬁng. You need a roof so that
the chickens have some dry dirt to roll their feathers in even during the winter. They need
to roll in the dirt to keep parasites under control. But you don’t want to limit the light, since the number of eggs
the produce is partly gated by the amount of light they get.


A hanging feeder like this works well.


And you want to get an automatic waterer with a ﬂoat, so you don’t need to always check the water.


I just threw this in because I couldn’t believe how tall this sunﬂower grew. The high
side of the chicken run is 7 feet.

The compost hatch



As I mentioned above, I wanted to be able to toss in compost without having to open
up the door and risk letting the chickens out, so I made a little compost hatch.


right above the compost bin.


The chickens hang out there all day. It seems to be their favorite spot. And as you
can see, they are perfectly happy hanging out on a 2x4.


The lock is important. Raccoons can open a simple latch. I just put the key on a string so
we don’t lose it.

The Egg Box


Chickens like a dark, comfortable place to lay their eggs. So most coops include nesting
boxes where the chickens can lay their eggs, but that are also accessible from the outside
so that you can fetch the eggs without disturbing them. (They sleep roosting on a branch,
not in the boxes, which they just use for egg laying.)


Here’s how we got the eggs in the old coop - a hatch on the back of the coop.


And here’s a closer look at it with the door open.


Here’s a look from the other side, inside the coop, with the door open. (You generally want the
door closed during the day so it will be dark and private, but open at night when they are
sleeping so it is well-ventilated.

Chicken Poop


There was one giant problem with the design of our old coop, and that had to do with
chicken poop.


When the chickens roost at night, they seem to defecate constantly. The nesting boxes
were below the roosting branch, so the nesting boxes were always getting poop in them.
We tried putting in a shelf to catch the poop, which was really gross, but better than
having to clean out the boxes every day.


I had just cleaned out the shavings that you use to catch the poop in this picture, but you can
still see what a mess it was. (If the boxes hadn’t been in the way, this would be ok. A lot of
people just toss in more shavings, and let the whole thing compost.


But for the new coop, I had a better idea, inspired by this mailbox on a fence at my
daughter’s house in San Francisco.


Duh. Put the nesting boxes on the outside.


And rather than having shavings on the bottom of the coop, put a wire mesh, so they
can poop right through it into a compost pile below.


Which we can get at through those doors below that I showed you earlier. When the
pile gets really deep, we can shovel it out and put it in the garden.


Of course, if there’s any area that has a surface under the poop zone, it will get covered...


But back to the nesting box ... I decided to put some storage cabinets underneath.


And the open doors provide a nice support for the outside door to the nesting boxes.
Note that I have three boxes, versus ﬁve in the old coop. Even three is plenty for our seven
chickens - you can get by with one or two, since the chickens rarely all want to lay at the same time.


And as you can see, the eggs are nice and clean inside.


Here’s a view from inside the coop. As you can see, it is MUCH cleaner than the old coop.


A close up of the eggs. One of the eggs - the darker brown one - is actually wooden. I
used to see these at feed stores, and wondered about them. Then I learned that they
are a way to encourage the chickens to lay eggs in more than one box. They are creatures
of habit, and when they see an existing egg, they go there to add to it. Sometimes two chickens will try to
squeeze into the same box. Putting a wooden egg in each box
encourages them to spread the wealth.


And again, a reminder that any opening to the outside should be secured with
a lock, and not just a latch, to protect against raccoons.

Ratproofing
Hardware cloth across floor, covered by 4-6
inches of dirt
Trench 12-24 inches deep around perimeter,
with vertical hardware cloth
Don’t give the rats anything to get their
claws into at the top of the hardware cloth


Now, the next big topic: ratproofing. Our old coop was floored with hardware cloth, but the
rats just tunneled under it to get at anything the chickens dropped. You really need to
put a trench around the coop, and have hardware cloth go vertically down 12-24 inches so
they can’t tunnel under it.


Here you can see the hardware cloth under the dirt ﬂoor of the new coop and run.


On the lower right, you can still see the trenching left from construction. (We hadn’t
ﬁlled that side since we were also putting in some electrical conduit.)


And here you can see the rats trying to get under the coop. No luck. A foot deep seems
to have held them, but I’m wishing I’d gone deeper.


More rat tunnels.


Now here’s the really surprising thing: big fat rats can squeeze their way through chicken wire (but not hardware
cloth, with its much smaller holes.) (In our old coop, I once found a very fat rat who got stuck halfway through. I
had to whack him with a shovel...) They just need something to grab on with their claws or teeth. Here you can
see how they chewed an old piece of fence to pull themselves back out through the wire.
I put some additional hardware cloth higher up to keep them out, and that worked.


The problem was that I originally put this nice 2x4 rail to ﬁnish the interface between the underground hardware
cloth and the chicken wire. It looked really nice, but it defeated the purpose, since the rats could use my nice rail
to pull themselves through the chicken wire. Here, I retroﬁtted by putting additional hardware cloth higher up,
where there was nothing for them to grab onto.

Bonus

A Treehouse made with webbing



I just thought I’d throw this in while I was taking pictures. I made an impromptu treehouse by putting webbing
across the space between two oak limbs. I got a 12x12 cargo net from Amazon, and tied it on with nylon aircraft
cord. It makes a great temporary tree fort.


And it can be made more comfortable with cushions borrowed from the garden furniture!


I tried some smaller webbing too. You either want the webbing to be really big or really small. You don’t want
something in between that could choke kids if they slip. They could fall through the big openings (but generally
don’t), or could use smaller webbing like a hammock.
We ended up liking the big webbing best.
It’s not shown in the pictures, but I adapted a climbing rope net from a swing set (that I also bought on Amazon)
so the kids can climb up into the cargo net tree house.

From chicken coop to chicken palace (pdf with notes)

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