Monday, April 29, 2013

Weirdest looking chicken ever, squatting in the stripped down coop



That is the chicken coop in a state of dis-assembly that will allow us to move it to its new location. Basically stripped down to nothing but the bones.

Actually, since we are here, this is a quick run down of what you are looking at:

This is the coop we built last year, it's a (extensively) modified design I saw of a coop that accomodates 4 chickens, we will have about 30 long term, so needed more space.

It's a  6+ foot tall, double story coop, meaning that the layer you see in the middle is the upper story, there is chicken wire flooring in there to give the girls more space to spread out. You can see the ladder going up to that level. The grey, furry looking squatter chicken is sitting on one of two perches. We did this to maximize the square footage for the chickens and that so we would be able to keep them in the coop for a few days when we are gone for a long weekend.
The roof is corrugated plastic of some sort.
The triangular, window looking thing on the facing side of the coop is just that, it's an opening that is covered in chicken wire and has a cover that closes it off in inclement weather, the opposite side of the coop is similar, except instead of a wood surround with wired window, it's just wired and covered with a solid piece when needed.
The lower portion is enclosed with chicken wire except for the exit.
The two bottles that are zip tied to the frame you can see in the front are how the chickens get their water, they are gravity fed nipple equipped.

We've stripped the wooden walls off and will make some modifications to the design, largely because the tall end will face a wall (entrance has to move) and because we want to be able to walk into the coop, so part of the second story will have to be cut out and re-finished. We will likely also change the 'flooring' of the second story, since the chickens did not like walking on the wire and we kept it covered with cardboard, but that is a nightmare to keep clean, so there is a change coming with that as well. We previously had roosting boxes in the coop, but have decided to have them as protrusions from the short end of the structure, to make them easier to access (lemme tell you, crawling into a 3' tall chicken enclosure to get the eggs laid in the back corner is not fun,which is why I decided that it's a mans job and made the hubbin do it).

I'll put a post together with what we wind up doing once it's done along with what didn't work and why, since some things are not fully decided because they depend on material cost and how the re-design winds up working out.

Here is a close up of that weird looking chicken:


Methinks we may have to build the cats a coop of their very own at some point.

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