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Plans For Building Chicken Coops - Making A Diy Hen Coop
By Carole M Hopkins
If you are considering making a DIY hen coop, you will need to get hold of some plans for building chicken coops. Alternatively, you may wish to design a coop yourself. If you have never kept poultry before, there are a few things to bear in mind which may help your decision making when it comes to deciding which type of coop is right for you and your chickens.
If you are a first-timer, you will be surprised at the amount of waste just a few chickens can produce! I have six ex-battery hens and find I am doing a quick "clear up" of poop on a daily basis and a clean out of the sleeping area on a weekly basis. For this reason, when you are looking at various coop plans, make sure that the one you choose has easy access for cleaning. This could be by way of a rear door which is separate to the external run as access can be difficult if your only access is via the run.
Access is also important for other reasons. You will need to collect eggs on a daily basis as leaving them in the coop can cause problems. The hens might be tempted to begin eating the eggs if they are left around for too long and this can become a regular problem, thus depriving you of the eggs. In addition, you will need easy access to change the water (they drink such a lot!) and for feeding.
Another important thing to consider when looking at plans for building chicken coops is whether your coop will be fixed or movable. I started with a movable coop and this was excellent as I would change the positioning of it when the grass underneath had become bare, thus allowing it to regrow. It made "mucking out" so much easier too. At the moment I am using an old cattery pen to house my hens and this is fixed to the ground. Cleaning is so much more difficult as I have to actually go inside the coop with a spade. MY recommendation would be that if you are intending to keep up to 6 hens, you can make an excellent DIY coop which is light enough to be moved round the garden by 2 people.
You should also consider where the coop is likely to be sited. Too near the house, and you may be faced
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with unpleasant smells. Too far away, and feeding and egg collection can become a chore. Mine is sited around 20 feet away from my back door and I find this to be fine.
You should carefully study the plans for building chicken coops which you have decided to use to ensure that they are not overcomplicated and outside your skill-set. Many of the downloadable plans from the internet can be complicated designs, requiring a master craftsman (or woman!) rather than someone of average skills. This can easily result in an abandoned project, and you could easily have unnecessarily wasted money on materials.
On the subject of hens, although there are many breeds and varieties you can choose from, if the possibility arises, I would urge you to give a home to ex-battery hens. In the UK the Battery Hen Welfare Trust rescues these birds when they would otherwise have been destroyed. I'm not sure if something similar goes on in the States or other parts of the world, but if it does, I would urge you to consider them. My ex-battery hens are about two years old now and each one produces a lovely egg each day. They are very friendly and after a shaky start, when some were almost featherless, they are now beautiful hens, with feathers to befit those hens in agricultural shows. (You can see pictures of my hens in the early days via the links below).
As a chicken keeper and retailer of chicken housing myself, I was looking for ideas to incorporate into my own designs and this lead me to a book by a fellow chicken-lover. His plans for building chicken coops were so simple that they were almost as easy to construct as my own self-assembly coops were to put together! I have since recommended his book to numerous customers who were looking at making a DIY coop themselves and all have been delighted by both the simplicity and quality of the designs.
In addition, it has been shown that building your own housing can save over 50% of the cost of a comparable flatpacked pen and even those with very little experience in DIY can follow simple chicken pen plans without difficulty.
To take a look at the different options which are available, please visit Plans For Building Chicken Coops |
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