Basic Steps for Building a Chicken Coop

The good thing about building a chicken coop is that it is easy and relatively inexpensive to build. For a basic coop, what you will need is chicken wire, lumber, basic hand tools, wood screws, and a few other miscellaneous items. Raising chickens is an economical and ingenious way to provide for your family, you can have fresh eggs daily and meat from the chickens year round. Building a chicken coop with chicken wire is an easy task that can be completed in one day. Then you will have a place for you chickens that you can they can be proud of.

First of all, before you even pick out the plans you are going to use, you must check your local animal care laws to make sure that keeping chickens in your backyard is legal and what other rules you will have to follow. Many people do not know about this or ignore it, but in either case if you begin building a chicken coop and then local authorities find out about it (and trust me they will because chickens are noisy and someone will eventually complain), they will take everything you build and they give you a hefty fine. All this could be avoided if you just checked what was legal before you started building a chicken coop.

The floor of your coop is the foundation on which everything else you build will rest. So take a quick look at the area around the coop and make sure the ground is level and that is it is a high enough area where it will not flood when it rains.

Now you can start building. The first thing to do is put down a wooden floor by using plywood sheets. Keep in mind; these instructions are for permanent coop that won’t be moved. Chickens usually require 4 feet of moving space so plan accordingly. This means that the size of your coop will depend on how many chickens you want to raise.

Next, frame the walls of the coop by evenly spacing 2x4s around the perimeter of the coop no more than 16 inches apart. The roof can either be attached or detachable depending on how you want access for cleaning. The door is a simple swing door, must similar to a dog door you place in your house. Install it by cutting out a door in the front wall of the coop and reattach the cut piece to a hinge over the door.

Now, comes the fence. Once again the area you need to fence will depend on the number of chicken you have. Now that you have the area figured out, drive wooden stakes into the ground around your coop. Now, staple chicken wire stake to stake. Remember, this is a permanent coop, so in order to protect your chickens from predators, dig a one foot trench and bury the chicken wire.  This will deter predators like cats, foxes, rats and other animals that want get at your chickens. Now you have simple plan for building a chicken coop quickly and easily.