The Old Coop

If you have read my previous posts about the Pure Water Hollow chickens, you know that we are still novice chicken farmers. We currently have a flock of 23 hens and a couple of roosters, with a potential 6 to 10 more pullets to add to the flock soon. The chickens are mixed from game stock and maybe a Plymouth Rock or Dominique mix?

During some email correspondance I recently told someone that I would give some details about our chicken coop here as a post. It is not a very fancy coop, but it is working well for us. It was an old 8 X 12 out building that we were just storing junk in before we converted it to a chicken coop. It is built up on piers, which works out well for the lot because the chickens can go under the building for shade and protection from the weather. We put up chicken wire for the lot about 6 feet high. The lot itself is about 10 feet by 12 feet at the coop end but is just about 9 feet wide at the point end, due to our space confines. When you add the part under the building, the chickens have about 18 feet by 12 feet to walk around in the dirt. I cut a chicken door at the back of the coop, leading out to their lot. We usually keep them in the lot for the first half of the day and let them out to free range at the end of the day.

Here they are in the lot:



On the front and side of the coop, we built some small holding lots to put pullets in for a couple of weeks before they get introduced to the complete flock. We also use them for spare roosters waiting for the freezer, or for any chicken we need to separate from the rest of the flock. You can see the front one from this angle:




And you can sort of see the side one in this picture:




Those four squares with buttons are where we have the chicken's nests on the inside of the coop. Since the building is elevated, it makes for an easy task to get the eggs from the outside at a good height for humans. The nests are on the floor in the coop, but the chickens do not seem to mind. They like to sit in the nests even when they are not laying.







Each door opens into two nests, so we have 8 nests there all together.




Here are the nest boxes from the inside. I should have cleaned them up a bit for the picture, but this is how it really looks. We need to put a diagonal board above the nests so they won't roost there and make such messes. The cement blocks are there to hold the row of nests down because I did not nail them in place. I wanted to be able to remove the entire 8 foot row of nests when we wanted to clean them out and put in fresh straw.




I couldn't get a good picture of the roosts, but we have staggered the roosts 2 feet apart from each other at 2 feet high, 3 feet high, 4 feet hight, and 5 feet high. They go the 8 foot width of the coop, so if you do the math, that is 32 feet of roosting space.




So, as you can see, it is not a very fancy coop. We are thankful that we already had a building that worked out for us.

I also made a sliding door that closes off the chicken door to the lot which we can close from outside the coop. I didn't get a picture of it, but we do close up the coop each night after the chickens have gone in to roost, for their protection.

By the way, at least one of our chickens is laying now. We are averaging one egg every other day. I'm looking forward to being overloaded with eggs again, which should start happening after the days begin to lengthen again in January.

If you want to check out someone elses chicken lot, I have enjoyed some of pcsmom's posts from last year. There is one when they enlarged their lot, too, and a good one with details of their coop.