The Scoop on the Coops:
Our chicken coops over the years.
Our brand new coop arrived last week and it’s had us thinking about the coops we’ve had so far so we thought we would make a few posts this week highlighting our coops from past to present and all the pros and cons of each one in case like us, you always love a good coop tour and review and wish HGTV would make a “Coop Hunters” tv show!
Coop #1: The Starter Coop
I wish there were more photos of this coop! This was our first coop made to house my first 3 chickens. I was so excited that Jordan agreed to buy me 3 lavender Orpington hens for Christmas and all I knew is that they had to have a PINK coop with an arched door and crystal door knob. Someone had offered an old premade small coop to us and on the way home from picking it up it almost completely fell apart. It had seen better days and couldn’t handle the trip to our house.
Thankfully the framing stayed mostly in tact and Jordan was able to fill in and put it back together with new materials and because of that it became much more study and served as a great little starter coop for us!
We filled in the sides and it gave our hens a wonderful place to shade in the summer, a space to get out of the rain and a windbreak in the winter. Jordan also added a metal roof which we loved having.
The “upstairs” housed a little area for the chickens to roost and Jordan built on nesting boxes where they could lay. He put a door on the back and cleaning was so easy! I swept out their shavings about once a month and was able to spot clean almost daily because of its small size.
It was pretty perfect for our little flock of 3-4 hens that first year and a half.
The only real con from this coop was that I really wanted more chickens and this coop just didn’t provide the space for that. I think also if it hadn’t had been in such a shady spot there would have needed to be more ventilation added but for the time we had it, it served its purpose well!
The Run-down:
Our run for this coop was a second hand 10×20 dog pen. To make it a little more secure it was wrapped in chicken wire (don’t recommend but we were newbies) and the roof was covered in poultry netting.
The last year we had this set up we also adopted in a very aggressive (to other chickens) stray hen/street chicken we named Holly. The dog pen allowed us the space to section off a section just for her where she had her only little hen apartment. We were also able to use some extra metal panels to make part of the run covered and in the winter it was easy to hang plastic sheeting to help with creating a wind break for them.
Holly eventually was able to integrate with the other chickens and even hatched and raised our little silkies in the flock but not before we designed and built our next coop. Check in again for all the details on our “Cottage Coop” Jordan built when we moved to the country.
While we don’t recommend chicken wire for keeping your chickens safe from predators we were newbies and just learning. Thankfully we never lost a chicken to a predator but we also tried taking extra precautions by locking up our hens each evening with a lock on each door and it also helped that our yard had a privacy fence around it.