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Chicken Coop Designs Archives

How to Position Your Chicken Coop and Tips on Building It

Some simple tips for orienting and building your chicken coop

There’s a few ways that you can get your own chicken coop to house your chickens, the obvious to are to build one or to buy one. If you can scrounge materials successfully it can be quite cheap to build your own chicken coop.

A backyard chicken coop with a green roof.
Image via Wikipedia

However whether you plan to build or to buy one you do need to think about a few things about where you will put your henhouse and how you will position it.

It’s best to face your henhouse towards the east or the north-east. This allows the morning sun to warm the henhouse but protects it from the hot afternoon sun in the summer. On the western side of your chicken coop plant shrubs or trees that can provide shade after lunchtime.

If you have chicken wire across the front of the coop this allows the suns rays to enter in the morning. It’s very important to have chicken wire across a part of the chicken coop for another reason as well. It is essential to ensure that the coop has good ventilation, preferably with 2 places with mesh wire to allow the entry and the exit of breeze.

As you will need to clean the chicken coop regularly you will need to allow for this when building it.

For example we built our own chicken coop with a door that is large enough to allow entry of a wheelbarrow so that we can shovel the waste material directly into the wheelbarrow without having to take it outside to do so and can also bring in wheelbarrow loads of new sawdust, which we use to line the floor of the chook house.

You also need to consider what you will make your henhouse from. We used second-hand Cyprus posts 4 inches square as uprights, put a simple frame between them to allow for nailing of weatherboards, put a single piece of timber across the centre of the roof for attaching second-hand corrugated iron and this produced a simple but very effective shed at low cost. Of course you also need to provide both nesting boxes and perches inside the shed. Read the rest of this entry

The Purpose Of Nesting Boxes In Chicken Coops

What do nesting boxes in chicken coops actually do, and how big should they be?

We’ve recently been asked about chicken nesting boxes. What nesting boxes are, what place that they have in the chicken coop and how big they should be.

Chicken egg in straw nest
Image via Wikipedia

So let’s look at chicken nesting boxes for a moment. As the name suggests nesting boxes are for your chooks to nest in. This means that that is the place where they will lay their eggs, and if you leave the eggs there for them to do so they will sit on them in the hope of hatching some chicks.

Of course the likelihood of chicks hatching depends on whether or not you have a rooster. But the chooks don’t know that and they will happily sit on unfertilised eggs if you leave them in the nesting box to build up.

In our view the prime purpose of the nesting box is to give the chicken somewhere that is relatively dark. They seem to prefer nesting in dark places. They can be fussy about where they nest and we find on occasions that they will often nest in some 44 gallon drums that we have outside the chicken coop instead.

Our nesting boxes in the chicken coop that we built have a removable lid. If we leave the lid off some of the boxes they will all try to nest in the box with the lid on.

We also suspect that they prefer nesting boxes that are not only relatively dark but are also quite small. A box that is not much larger than chicken is probably ideal, and if you make it much bigger you will often find that there is another chook in the box trying to lay her egg there as well.

About the most important consideration for nesting boxes is that they be easy to clean, so make sure they have some form of removable lid so that you can lift the lid to clean the box. Read the rest of this entry

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