Keeping Backyard Chickens
If you are considering building a chicken coop and investing in a few backyard chickens, you've come to the right place!
Keeping just three or four backyard chickens has so many more features to recommend it than just the obvious one of fresh, organic, nutritious eggs daily:
- Chickens provide chemical-free bug and weed control
- Chickens manufacture the worlds best fertilizer
- Chickens are easy and inexpensive to maintain
- A backyard chicken coop will be one of the best investments you'll ever make
- Chicken keeping is FUN. Yes, you will be surprised at the personalities they have
It's So Quick And Easy To Get Started
Building your chicken coop yourself will save you a small fortune. Pre-assembled coops can cost you well in excess of $1,000 (not including installation) and assemble yourself kits are not much cheaper.
Thousands of people with just the very basic DIY skills are very successfully building their own chicken coops. They are easy to construct with common hand tools, and can be done by anyone with little prior carpentry experience.
Take a look at the sample coop to the left. Using an especially easy to follow guide to building your own perfect chicken coop my husband and I built it from start to finish last Memorial Day weekend. We don't have a pickup truck so we enlisted the help of a neighbor to transport the lumber home from the Home Depot, but everything else we did ourselves. Everything! You won't believe how adept I became at measuring and cutting!
We acquired the plans/blueprints from Building A Chicken Coop. Following purchase, we were able to instantly download the plans, with easy to follow cross-sectional diagrams that include exact dimensions and required materials. Perfect for a couple of amateur DIY'ers.
There are a number of design options, and after we'd chosen the one we wanted we were able to print off multiple copies of the plans, which meant we didn't need to worry about getting a single copy dirty or torn.
Before construction began we had to decide on the chicken coop's location which is important not only for the safety of the chickens, but also for protection against the elements and ease of maintenance. Primarily the coop should be sited on a high, well drained area facing the sun so that when it rains, it and the surrounding soil dries quickly. Facing the south achieves this the best since the coop will receive direct sunlight throughput the day
To protect against predators the best and easiest solution involves burying the wire walls of the outside run at least a foot deep. This should thwart predators such as foxes, raccoons, skunks, sometimes even coyotes, cats and dogs from digging underneath. If your area is known to be especially vulnerable to predators you may also want to look into a hotwire system. Used solar powered or battery powered systems can often be picked up cheaply on Craigslist.
After pricing pre-assembled coops and assemble yourself kits, just as my husband and I did, a great many people decide to follow the DIY route. BUT, an article I read claimed that the average DIYer without any clear cut plans or blueprints to follow spends as long as two months trying to get the structure right and in the end are not happy with their creation.
That's exactly why I highly recommend Bill Keen's excellent package of blueprints and information. He has many years of experience in poultry farming, and has created an easy to follow guide to building your own perfect chicken coop.
