If you think about it, it’s actually rather hard to make a chicken coop without having the proper tools with which to make them. By tools, we aren’t talking about hammers, nails and other such basic carpentry equipment.
When we talk of a decent chicken coop kit, we have to consider the various aspects of what your chickens will need in order to live a healthy and happy life in your backyard poultry farm.
But it’s almost impossible to know how to build a decent chicken coop for the first time without missing out on the details. In order to achieve this, you need to know what the parts of a chicken coop are, and be able to tell how they function.
And just like any other architectural endeavor, there are plenty of parts and functions to take note of.
Knowing how each part interacts with the other – and basically, knowing what they do – will help you put together a functional and decent chicken coop kit for starting your backyard chicken farm.
However, there are two simple things that most people overlook when putting together a kit for building their chicken coops.
Slope the Floor!
The most important thing to remember when setting up your chicken coop is that this place is going to be the place where you’ll be raising your chickens from egghood to their deaths.
Since it isn’t very likely that your chickens will be cleaning the coop out themselves (if they do, hit me up and let me buy some eggs off you), the easier it is for you to clean out your chicken coop, the better it will be for you in the long-run.
That’s because a badly-designed chicken coop will be an extremely difficult for you to clean up!
The truth is, chickens can be extremely messy creatures at times. Their scat alone can build up if you don’t watch out, and accumulated chicken poop is unsightly, attracts dangerous bugs that can harm both you and your chickens, and can be the cause for structural breakdown in your coop.
This is why you plan your coop’s design to make cleanup easier: make sure that the floor of your coop is tilted downwards, heading towards the door. That way, hosing the chicken droppings out of the coop is an overall easier endeavor.
You might also want to include wood shavings and hay-like materials in your chicken coop – these things will make for decent floor linings and absorb moisture from chicken waste, ensuring that you won’t have to take care of cleaning up a sloppy mess.
Chickens need Breathing Space Too
Ventilation and lighting are two other features of a chicken coop that you’ll have to consider seriously.
Chickens need steady ventilation in order to thrive well. The reasoning behind this is that your chickens are living creatures that require oxygen to survive.
Not just because they need to breathe (although that’s the biggest reason for putting in decent ventilation in your chicken coop, and no mistake), chickens are sensitive to the amount of breathing space they have available.
A stuffier coop means sadder chickens, while a coop with decent ventilation means happier birds.
That’s why every chicken coop kit should include enough material for windows that will work for your coop.
Place the windows on opposite ends of the structure so that wind passes freely throughout the room.
But if you live in an area that can get too cold for comfort, be sure to put in safeguards against freezing your chickens as well – you want them to be happy; You don’t want any of your living birds to become popsicle sticks.
Happy Building!
