Once the decision was made to start keeping chickens, one of the first things that we had to tackle was the coop. We started looking around online, at our local feed store, and pet stores. One of the very first things we had to decide was size. This goes back to the Know Your Codes post. Most cities, and many counties, have regulations regarding the minimum coop space per chicken. In Salt Lake City, you need 2 square feet per chicken if they will be allowed outside during the day, and 6 square feet per chicken if they won't. To start off we planned to have 8 chickens, and they would be allowed outside, so we needed a minimum of 16 square feet. However, I know how The Husband gets with animals, so I pushed to have enough square footage to be able to have the maximum 15 chickens allowed by the city because I had a sneaking suspicion that we would get there eventually. At the maximum 15 chickens, we were going to need a minimum of 30 square feet.
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| Adorable and available at most feed stores, but WAY too small... |
Typically, you have four options when obtaining a chicken coop: buy one new from a store or online, buy one used (usually in your local classifieds or Craigslist), build one, or have someone build one for you. We couldn't find a chicken coop big enough for our eventual 15 chickens in any stores or online. Most of them would fit no more than 3-4 chickens by the city's standard, though we did find one that would have fit 8. We also couldn't find anything used that was big enough but not way too big - like a shed that we could convert, for example.
That left either building a coop, or having one built for us. Well, if we're anything, we're DIY'ers, so build one, it was.
From that point, I asked The Husband for input. He said something along the lines of, "Design what you want and we'll make it happen. No chandeliers though." Party pooper.
So I started looking for inspiration online and collecting things on Pinterest. To see the whole thing, look at my Fancy Chicken Coops board here. The main inspirations for me came down to these three (one of which is based off another one):
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| Chez Poulet by Heather Bullard at heatherbullard.com |
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| Gorgeous coop from The Art of Doing Stuff based loosely on Chez Poulet |
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| Titled 'My Mid Life Crisis Coop' and found at http://www.backyardchickens.com/a/my-mid-life-crisis-coop |
Gorgeous coops one and all! I wanted something like these that integrated a fully enclosed coop with attached fully enclosed run. Given that we needed at least 30 square feet of coop space, we decided to make our lives easy and do everything in 4 ft x 8 ft sections (32 square feet). So, I drew it up on the whiteboard in our kitchen and on graph paper. I apparently didn't take any pictures of that part though. :(
In the end, the enclosure was designed to be 8 ft x 8 ft total. Half of that would have the coop which would be elevated 2 feet off the ground to allow the chickens more room to roam around outside. We opted for external nest boxes and access doors on both ends. We started looking in our local classifieds for some materials that we hoped to get for cheaper than retail thanks to other people's remodeling leftovers. We wound up getting all of our roofing shingles for free (!) because someone was cleaning out her 80-year-old mother's basement and those were left overs from two roofs ago...We also got the majority of our hardware from our local Habitat for Humanity ReStore. The remainder of the materials we picked up at Home Depot with the use of our endlessly patient friend's van.
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| Roofing shingles from the '70s! They were still perfectly good though. |
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| Piles and piles of plywood, siding, 2x4's, 4x4's, and 1x2's. |
In the next installment, the the build begins...
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