Written by Stephen Clay McGehee. Reposted with permission from The Southern Agrarian – http://www.southernagrarian.com/
A chicken coop can be built from almost any kind of scrap lumber and they usually are. The cheap, light-weight coops are quite popular, and for good reason – but that’s not always the best solution. I have built a number of chicken coops over the years, and each was very different from the others.
I wanted to build a chicken coop that would be my last one. It would be designed and built for the long term. I wanted it to last the rest of my life and then be used for many years after that. This is the first of an occasional series of posts describing this project in the hope that others might get some ideas from it. These were my requirements:
- Long lasting – it would be built using many of the same materials and techniques that a regular house would use.
- Predator-proof
- Easy to maintain
- Aesthetically pleasing – it sits in the back yard and is part of the landscape
- Semi-portable. Though it is stationary, I wanted to be able to relocate it if needed.
- Well ventilated – in this area, protecting chickens from overheating is a major factor
In future posts, we’ll look at some of the features that make it work – as well as a thing or two that I wish I’d done differently. We’ll also look at things like the feeder that I built that results in near-zero food waste – far better than the commercial ones.
In the next post, we’ll look at some photos of it as it was being built.
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