“Honey, we should get some chickens and build a chicken coop.”

Click here to visit Building A Chicken Coop

A few months passed without either of us doing much about it until we decided to start researching how to actually build a chicken coop. We went to the library and came up pretty much empty-handed. The next logical step was to go online to see what we could find. We found a few free downloadable chicken coop plans but found them to be either too lacking in information or assuming a certain level of expertise which neither of us had.

We eventually came across How To Build A Chicken Coop and were immediately impressed with the look of the site. Compared with a lot of the other amateurish looking products out there, this one looked pro right off the bat. The question remained, was the product as slick as the site would have us believe?

How To Build A Chicken Coop is a well-produced, informative eBook covering the basics and advanced techniques required to start keeping your own chickens. I don’t think it’s ideal for someone without any DIY experience at all however as it assumes a certain level of proficiency with a hammer and nails. If this is you, I would stay away until you’ve either learned a few basics or enlist the help of a friend to help you build your coop.

Having done so much research into building a chicken coop before purchasing this eBook, I had a certain expectation of what I’d find “between the covers” when I downloaded it. Where most of the other ones I’d seen were essentially Word documents, it was refreshing to see a well-designed, visually appealing product. The diagrams were absolutely top-notch and the writing was succinct and easy to follow.

The range of topics covered in the book includes:

• The Basics on selecting your materials
• Detailed Step-by-Step instructions
• The 9 chores you MUST perform to keep a healthy coop
• How to build it with cheap materials
• Where to position your coop
• Specifics about different flooring techniques

There are quite a few free ebooks on the internet that cover building chicken coops. They range from the frustratingly short 1 pagers to the unnecessarily verbose tomes that look like the blueprints for a skyscraper. The old adage of “you get what you pay for” certainly applies here as I never found any of them to good enough to motivate me to actually go to Home Depot and start buying 2×4s.

If you’re at all like me and like to get a job done right the first time, How To Build A Chicken Coop will ensure that you end up with a chicken coop you can be proud of. More importantly, you’ll have a bunch of happy, healthy chickens and a wonderful addition to your life.

Click here to visit Building A Chicken Coop.

“Nothing calms you more than sitting out in the yard watching your chickens poke around for bugs and carry on conversations with each other,” said Carla Allen, who keeps chickens on her ranch in San Marcos.

Of particular interest is the resurrection of Backyard Poultry magazine. With over 50k subscribers, the publishers were keen to take advantage of this surge of interest in the industry. They cover everything from the basics of keeping chickens to how to build your own chicken coop.

“The biggest growth I see is the organic group that want to know where their eggs are from,” he said. “A lot of urban people fall into that family.”

Many people in urban centers that aren’t allowed to house chickens are taking it upon themselves to lobby their city councils. Sarah Hempel Irani, 29, of Frederick, Md. runs the Urban Chicken Underground and is quite vocal about getting the city to lift their ban.

A limit will be placed on the number of hens and chicks allowed in any backyard. A ban on roosters will remain. What’s more, Vancouver chicken wranglers will be expected to keep their birds tidy, refreshed, and relatively happy.

It isn’t likely to be good news for condo dwellers as they’re not likely to have room to build a chicken coop. However there’s always garden plots to go stake a claim on.

Raising chickens should not be a fuss. There are actually several reasons why people want to cultivate chickens in their backyard. Some of these are written below.

Reason # 1 – Chickens love leftovers.

A chicken’s appetite is incredible. They can eat almost everything, even their own kind! You can now say bye-bye to those unwanted leftovers being left rotten in your fridge. You feel less guilty of throwing them out into the garbage can. Plus, you can save on chicken feed. But be very careful with what you give for it may be their last supper. Tone down on the onions and garlic.

Reason #2 – Eggs!

Who doesn’t love eggs? Have them boiled, scrambled, sunny side up, etc. Admit it, pets that live comfortably inside your houses don’t give anything more than barks, meows, purrs, and sometimes, chirp. Fishes, in general, can be eaten, but who would want to eat Goldie? None of these domesticated animals produce something edible. Well, chickens, on the other hand, have lots of benefits. One of the many benefits chickens give is their egg.

You can eat fresh eggs right from the source. Either raw (good for pregnant women) or cooked, eggs taken from chickens minutes or hours ago are more tasty and nutritious than those purchased in the grocery store. You’ll notice the texture and color is way different than that of the fresh ones.

Reason #3 – Source of natural fertilizers

Your lawn or backyard could’ve never looked better. Chickens love to freely walk around. Chickens also love to peck on anything they see that can be considered as food. And what is food to them? Possibly anything that’s organic. If you let your chickens roam around your space, you’ll find out how reliable they can be. They eat pests living in your backyard – grubs, beetles, insects, earwigs, and anything that comes close.

After the digestion has set its due, they will transform what they’ve eaten into poop. But this is not just any kind of poop but a treasure called natural fertilizer. And you know what natural fertilizers do right? They keep the soil healthy for plants to grow. Cool.

Reason #4 – Low Maintenance Pets

Unlike dogs that need combing and brushing everyday to keep their fur alive and shiny, chickens doesn’t need such soulful treatment. All you have to do is provide them their daily needs like food and water. You also have to clean their coop at least twice a month and change the beddings too. In return, you can gather all the eggs. Aside from just gathering, you can also start a small business of your own by supplying poultry stores with fresh eggs or chicken meat.

Reason #5 – Grass and weed clippers

Got that right. Now you can save on mowing your own lawn by getting yourself chickens! For chickens, grasses, weeds, and leaves are treats. It’s like a lifetime dessert offering. It’s like having a cow in your own backyard. They will dig through whatever it is without even complaining about the hard work. Chickens will clip it then clean it all at the same time.

With these reasons, why bother getting yourself a dog or a cat? No offense but they can’t even water the plants nor lay eggs for breakfast. All they do is prove to their masters that they are either one’s best friends. In cases of chickens, you can have a best friend, a lawn mower, a supplier of organic fertilizer and an egg producer all in one.

The fowls were fed alike in each case. The morning mash consisted of corn meal, ground middlings and ground oats, and at night whole grain was scattered in the litter. They also had fresh water, grit and bone and granulated bone. The experiment started November 24 and continued for five months. The following table shows the number of eggs laid during each period of thirty days :

RESULTS FROM COLD AND WARM HOUSES
1 2 3 4 5 Total
Warm house 87 130 138 120 154 629
Cold house 39 106 103 124 114 486

The experiment clearly indicates that it is important to build warm and substantial houses for winter egg production.

In very cold climates special pains should be taken to make the roosting place warm. Combs are usually frozen during the night. Double walls battened with lath outside and lined with building paper make a warm roost room. With single-wall houses, double boarding on the north side is a protection. An outside shield of corn stalks or hay and litter is also effective.

Costly material is not needed for the poultry house. Often a discarded barn or other building can be bought cheap and the sound lumber used again. Others on farms can work up home grown timber. For city poulterers, large packing boxes bought at dry goods stores are a cheap source of lumber. Sometimes old street cars have been bought for a trifle and remodeled. Serviceable houses have been made from staves of old barrels as an outside covering. Old strips of carpet, oilcloth, wall paper or building paper may be utilized to some extent as mside protection.

A coat of home-mixed paint improves the durability and appearance of a house enough to pay for its cost. Whitewash is much better than nothing, and will add years to the life of second-hand lumber.

Shingles properly applied to a roof of fairly steep pitch are the best and warmest roofing, but a strip of building paper should be laid beneath to keep out currents of cold air which work in between the shingles. Tin or iron is sometimes cheaper than wood, and for temporary structures, felting paper with a coat of paint will last about two years. An advantage of sheet materials for roofing is that a steep pitch is not needed to carry off the water, but such materials are cold in winter and hard to repair when damaged.

Glass in Cold Weather - Amateur builders commonly use too much glass, which makes a house unnaturally warm on sunny days, but extremely and dangerously cold by night and on stormy days. One window not over three feet square and about eighteen inches above the floor to each ten feet of house length is enough. Warmth is much increased by a shutter or curtain for night. Windows should be arranged to slide to one side or be easily taken out during hot weather.

Double windows are sometimes used, but these are expensive, somewhat of a bother to put on and hard to keep clean. The cut, Figure 3, shows a single sash, double glazed, which a poultryman has recently described. The sash is made so that the glass can be set on both sides of the wooden bars, leaving a half inch or more of space between. This gives a double window and the cost is said to be not more than twenty-five cents extra per sash for the glass and the labor of setting. Those who are providing windows for new or re-modeled poultry houses will do well to experiment with this plan. The glazing must be tight and carefully done to keep out all dirt and dust from the inner surfaces of the glass. Figure 4 shows a window partly double, making a convenient arrangement for ventilating without draft, and securing greater warmth at night and on cloudy days. Roosts, Nests, Troughs, Fountains, etc, will not be treated at length in this volume. Roosts should be all on a level, should be about two inches thick, rounded on the upper side, not over two feet from the floor, and removable.

Troughs and Drinking Places should be protected by slats. Nests should be numerous, secluded and easily removed. Beware of too complicated inside arrangements when large numbers of fowls are kept for profit. Successful large farms are nearly always conducted on very simple plans, but with emphasis placed on the main needs of the fowls. Notes - Dryness and warmth are the two main essentials in most climates. Everything inside should be removable, also doors and windows. The house should be made tight enough feo hold smoke when fumigated.

Cost ranges from twenty-five cents to five dollars per fowl. A reasonably good business house may be built at one dollar per head. When building an all-around house, provide for summer as well as for winter. Rather than extend beyond seventy-five feet, better start a new building. Study actual needs of fowls rather than comfort of the attendant.

On rather poor land the fowls should also have wide range in order to find enough wild food. Good pasturage should be considered as important as for cattle.

Rocky land is seldom made the location of large farms for poultry culture, since frequent cultivation and cropping is a part of most systems. Money saved in buying rough or sandy land is soon lost many times over in decrease of net returns. If one may choose, let him buy good, clear, well drained loam, with a gradual southern slope and a forest protection at the north. But, as said before, most locations can be made satisfactory by suitable buildings and system of management.

The site of permanent buildings should be well drained naturally, but in a great majority of cases the conditions will be improved by at least heaping up with a horse scraper a little knoll of earth about the same in area as the house. Dryness is the great preventive of disease in poultry, and is even more important than warmth. A dry hen will stand a great deal of cold weather without much injury.

Foundation and Walls - It pays to have a stone foundation reaching down to frost line, or from one to three feet below the surface and rising about one foot above the, ground level. When covered with earth, a dry, dusty floor is ensured all winter, and rats are kept out even without a cement covering for the stone floor. Anything but a stone foundation is likely to take up more or less moisture, which will freeze and thaw, making the floor hard and cold, or muddy, neither state being suitable for scratching and for dust baths. Floors below ground are unsatisfactory in moist climates Dampness works in, spoils the scratching floor, stops laying and causes lameness, colds and bowel trouble. If the floor, however, has been raised by a rock filling, the outside of the building may be banked with earth to good advantage.

Tight Foundations - When small buildings are erected upon the farm, there is a temptation, in the interest of economy, to omit the tight stone foundation and put the building on posts. This leaves the building open beneath and permits the cold winds to reduce the temperature. A plan is shown in the cut, Figure i, which obviates this. The walls are boarded up and down, using matched cedar boards, and allowing these to extend to the ground, as shown. A little soil is then banked up against the lower end, which is grassed over quickly, making a tight foundation that will last many years. If the framing is made to use crosswise boarding, put on the latter as shown at right of Figure i, using a wide cedar board to extend from the sill down to the ground, and bank with a few inches of earth as before mentioned. The building can then be shingled or clapboarded.

In placing a house, let it face the south or as nearly so as possible. It is cooler in summer and warmer in winter than one facing either east or west. The sun in summer during the hottest part of the day is nearly directly overhead and does not shine in so strongly in a south window. In winter, when low in the heavens, the south window catches more of the sun’s rays.

A Poultry House Floor of cement may well be patterned after the plan shown at left of Figure 2. The foundation is of loose stones to give drainage. The stones above are cemented. A layer of small stones beneath the cement serves as drainage. The sills of the house are bedded in cement to keep out vermin. This plan gives an exceedingly warm house, and the cement floor will keep out all rats and poultry enemies. A cement floor is a cold affair in winter unless covered with plenty of dust and litter.

A Very Warm Wall designed by G. C. Watson of the Pennsylvania experiment station is double on all sides and practically air tight, with a two-inch air space between the walls. A section plan is shown at right of Figure 2. A two by three scantling set edgewise forms the plate, and to this the boards of the side walls are nailed. These boards may be of rough lumber if economy in building is desired. If so, the inner boarding should be nailed on first and covered with tarred building paper on the side that will come within the hollow wall when the building is completed. This building paper is to be held in place with laths or strips of thin boards. If only small nails or tacks are used, the paper will tear around the nail heads when damp and will not stay in place.

The cracks between the boards of the outside boarding may be covered with inexpensive battens if they are nailed at frequent intervals with small nails. Ordinary building lath will answer this purpose admirably, and will last many years, although they are not so durable as heavier and more expensive strips. The tarred paper on the inside boarding and the battens on the outside make two walls, each impervious to wind, with an air space between them. Common building paper may be used or stout paper of any kind.