Once you’ve established just how much space you’ll be devoting to your chickens, coop buying becomes the next order of business. Now, there are two ways of doing this: the easy way and the hard way.
Okay, you’re probably confused now. There’s a simple explanation here, though; it all depends on how you conduct your search or creation of the coop.
Depending on how you come up with the chicken coop for your backyard, you will either be sailing through the task like a hot knife through butter, or it will be the living equivalent of hell on earth.
Now, nobody wants to go through hell, so what you want to aim for is having an easy time of finding your perfect chicken coop.
Buying a chicken coop is just one of the answers: the alternatives include having one made, or if you’ve got the skills of a decent carpenter, making it yourself.
But that brings us away from our original point. In order to know how to find a chicken coop the easy way, let us illustrate how one can go about it in a way that’s counter-productive at best.
Count your chickens – even before they hatch
First of all: count your chickens. See, the problem with most people is that they don’t count chickens when they start planning for their coop.
Seriously, how can you know what you need in a chicken coop when you don’t even know how many chickens you’ll be keeping?
Or, god forbid, what kind of chickens you’ll be keeping?
Always know the kind of chicken you will be raising and how many birds you want before you start on your coop, because you don’t want to end up with a chicken coop that’s too small to house your birds.
It’s a material world
Second thing to remember when making your own chicken coop: buy materials that suit your location.
Some people make the mistake of buying cheap wood from the hardware store just because it’s cheap. Well this is a no-no. Some locations aren’t suited for most commonplace materials, either due to the local weather or because of the kind of creatures the area is notorious for.
Weak plywood boards, for example, will be easy for foxes to wreck, so you don’t want to use that. As a matter of fact, rodents of any kind that can pose a danger to your chicken coop will find a way to break through almost any wood, so that’s something to take into consideration.
And wood that easily warps with shifts in temperature are something you want to avoid at all costs. Not only would this compromise the structural integrity of your chicken coop, buying new materials to improve the structure’s quality will end up being more expensive for you in the long run.
