Chicken Coop

A big project to build a new chicken coop.

This is a summary of the project, with links to the individual blog posts about it.

February 2017

The second ever post on the Yellow Cottage Homestead blog included some sketches drawn in the excellent Linea iOS app of some of my early designs for a new chicken coop (click the link to see the original blog post):

I followed that up with refined plans:

March 2017

In March, things got underway, starting with a Home Depot order for delivery:

Which arrived a few days later:

And was organized:

Then it was time to begin building. Starting with the concrete footings:

Then the floor:

What comes after the floor? The roof, of course! No, seriously (see that post for why):

April 2017

Since I was building this while the weather was still rather dodgy, I got a canopy to cover the construction, keeping the wood, tools, and me dry:

That helped while I completed the roof rafters:

But it was too good to be true; the canopy was soon taken out by a wind storm:

Oh well, onward; I started on the front wall:

Then the back wall:

The right wall:

The left and center walls:

With the wall framing done, I moved on to mounting the rafters:

The roof extends beyond the walls on the ends, so I added sub-fascia and barge rafters for that:

Then time to start sheathing the walls with OSB sheets:

The OSB was then wrapped with Tyvek, to make it waterproof:

A minor addition of an awning over the pop door:

May 2017

Time to start on the roof:

Fascia and drip edge:

Roofing paper:

We got the chicks while I was working on the roof, so the pressure was on to finish, so they could move in:

Roof shingles:

Next was making custom doors and windows:

Adding trim around the windows and doors:

June 2017

Plus finishing off the awning:

Soffits are the underside of roof eaves; like the rest of the coop, I over-did them, too:

Jenn helped by painting the coop, starting with the doors and windows:

I finished the trim:

A fun addition: window planter boxes:

Painting window and door frames:

Installing the poop door and a ground barrier:

More painting, weathervane, etc:

I then started on the siding, using HardiPlank lap siding:

Finished siding:

Painting siding and installing windows:

North doors and windows:

Mounting the vents and windows:

Installing the center door, roosts, and light; yes, the coop has a chandelier:

July 2017

The coop is basically done at this point, so the chicks were able to move in:

But I wasn’t done with the construction. Next was a feeder tube and waterer:

Jenn planted the window boxes, and I added extra window hardware:

The feeder tube didn’t work very well, so I tweaked it:

August 2017

I’ll have a separate post summarizing building the chicken run, but a coop-related part of that was installing the pop door opener:

I didn’t make the nesting boxes when building the coop, other than doors to where they would be, since the chicks don’t start laying till about 18 months old. But one of the final steps for the coop was to build the nesting boxes:

September 2017

Then we finished the nesting boxes with nice curtains:

I also built a poop tray to go under the roosts, to make cleaning the coop easier:

October 2017

Another addition to the coop was an oyster shell and grit dispenser:

December 2017

As the weather got colder, I added a heated waterer for the chickens. The heating unit comes on when it’s cold, heating up the water just enough to prevent freezing: