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.

A couple of posts  ago, I posted about chicken coop sales and how they can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the seller, but I didn’t really elaborate on this topic.

Today, I will be talking in-depth about people who sell a variety of chicken coops in order to make good money, and hopefully, by the end of this reading, you will have a better idea of how to identify whether this guy is an authentic chicken coop dealer or if he’s just trying to pull a fast one on you.

First of all, let’s take a look at what a chicken coop is, and should be:

• A chicken coop is a place where you will grow your chickens. They will eat here, they will sleep here, and they will lay their eggs here. Others might even hatch inside your coop.

• Proper chicken coops aren’t just makeshift houses built to house your chickens. There has to be some sort of coherence in the design, a sort of intelligent layout that says the chicken coop salesman isn’t just trying to get you to buy his merchandise – he actually genuinely cares that you get the best equipment.

• If you live in a wet area, the chicken coop has to be designed to survive in your weather. If you don’t get a coop that can tough out the harsh winters of upper Nova Scotia, for example, then you’re better off growing your chickens inside an aquarium.

• Above all, a chicken coop should be functional in varying levels.

If you stumble upon somebody selling chicken coops that don’t embody these points, then yes, you are probably being cheated. Get out of the store immediately, and look for a better seller.

Chicken Coop Boot Camp

It’s not easy telling just how functional a chicken coop on display is just by seeing the coop from the outside.

I mean, if that was all that was needed to make good sales, then chicken coop salespeople just need to spiff up the look of their disposable unsold coops and that would already constitute as a sure sale for them.

But coops are more than just that. When you look inside the coop, you have to consider everything that you see.

Is there enough space for the chickens?

Will you be able to clean it out with relatively no trouble? Is there enough ventilation to ensure that your birds are happy?

The oldest lie most chicken coop salesmen would probably do involves chicken coop materials and the white lies that come with it. If you have a cedarwood chicken coop in a region that’s exceptionally tough on the wood, there’s a smaller chance of people buying that.

So what most sellers do is pass the material off as something designed to survive in your current weather, even though it isn’t. This is why most buyers need to constantly check on the make of the chicken coops they look at before buying them.

Function > Form

Sure, your chicken coop might be pretty, but can it play ball?

Well, in a manner of speaking, anyway. Unless you’re a master farmer with years of experience, most infant businesses dealing with chicken coop selling and buying usually just try to get any old thing removed from their shops.

Usually, these coops are nice-looking chicken houses in terms of façade, but if the inside of the coop doesn’t work, well no amount of beauty will fix that. If you can’t find a coop with a decent and logical interior coop set-up available, that’s pretty much a sign that this guy doesn’t know what the hell it is he’s doing.

So once you’re done browsing through his wares, go out of that door and don’t come back. The logical arrangement of the coop’s interior is important, and if your chicken coop salesman can’t get that through his skull, then you’re better off building your own coop from driftwood.

Till next time..

You can’t raise chickens without having a house designed specifically for them. For chickens, coops serve this purpose perfectly, and the fact is, you can’t raise birds without having a method of keeping them indoors.

No matter what kind of system you may be using, it’s rather easy to bet that you will have an easier time keeping them alive if you make sure that they have a place that they can call home—and if you’re anywhere near a decent pet owner, much less a poultry enthusiast, you will most probably want to keep them alive.

But then again, it’s not easy to match chickens, coops, and the owner.There are plenty of things to take into consideration, and if you don’t go over each aspect of getting your chicken coop built carefully, there’s a huge possibility that you might end up wrecking whatever life you have built up for your chickens.

And this can happen in the space of a few calamities, so you will want to prevent these possibilities as much as possible.

The question here is how. It isn’t like disaster-proofing your chicken coop is easy—there are plenty of things that can go wrong, and if you take the words of Murphy’s laws to heart, if things can go wrong, they will.

Now, I’m not saying that you need to create an engineering masterpiece of a structure, but you have to remember that a chicken’s coop can be attacked by a variety of outside and inside forces, so you want to make sure you prevent these things from happening—andknow how to counteract their effects when they do.

The disasters chicken coops are up against

If you think about it, the best way to fortify any structure is to know the dangers that they are liable to face. The same rules apply to a chicken’s coop’s defenses—the more you know about what can damage your birds’ home, the more prepared you can be.

1. You need to make sure that the structure is strong. Somewhere along the line, you’re bound to experience trouble with coyotes, foxes, and even rodents like mice, rats, raccoons.

   If you don’t have a structure that can withstand the damage these chicken predators can do, you’re very liable to lose some chickens easily.

2. What’s the weather in your area like? You must understand that the weather plays a very important role in how your chicken’s coop will hold up. Is it sunny where you live?

   So long as you protect against rodents and other pests, wood would actually be a good material to use for building your coop. The colder it gets, though, the more you’ll have to invest on tougher materials.

3. Need I remind you that the method of how you keep your chickens in should be taken into consideration as well? Take it from the weather—you can’t keep a chicken in a chicken tractor if you have a lot of rain. If you have a small plot of land, you can’t afford to let chickens roam in pasture.

Generally, the idea when creating your chickens’ coop is that you have to learn to work with what you have. That way, you can prevent the possible disasters that your chickens might have to face—and save yourself from spending more money than you should in keeping your birds safe.

Back in the old days when I was just starting out with my own batch of chickens, I had a dilemma.

I needed to find a surefire method of chicken feeding for my new brood of chicks.

Sure, I learned a lot from my folks when I was a kid, but they mostly home-fed the chickens that we had back then. I wanted to experiment with my own brood when I began my own backyard chicken farm, so I went to the farm suppliers and bought myself two weeks’ worth of feed.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the proper feed and for those two weeks, I had a brood of egg-layers that wandered around the backyard sullenly. Needless to say, my egg supply during that period of time was, well, dismal.

Trial and Error

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Feeding your chickens isn’t as hard as I just made it sound, but when you’re starting your own barn, you won’t have a very clear idea of what’s good for your chickens.

This is what makes things a little bit harder. If I remember my days as a neophyte, it was filled with plenty of trial and error sessions (I think I may have lost a bird or two somewhere along the line).

I tried factory-made chicken feed, free-ranging, concocting my own special feed using ingredients that I learned were the best for my birds – and let me tell you, the process can be pretty grueling at times.

The best method of chicken feeding, I discovered, is to find a routine that works the best for you and your chickens, and stick to it. Once you get that routine down pat, you’ll find that you won’t ever have any trouble with feeding your chickens in the future again.

Store-bought or Homemade?

That’s always been a tough decision when it comes to feeding animals. If it were up to them, they’d go find a suitable pasture to graze in, but unfortunately when you’re running a backyard chicken joint, that’s not an option (unless you’ve got a backyard ranch).

So the task falls upon us owners to keep these animals fed and happy.

What are the pros of store-bought chicken feed though? The biggest pro this method of feeding has going for itself is the fact that store-bought feeds are easier to prepare. All you need to do is pour the feed into their feeding troughs, and ensure that there’s enough feed for everybody, and you’re good to go.

Homemade chicken feeding’s biggest disadvantage is the fact that you actually have to prepare the food. Since you can’t just feed chickens table scraps as you would a cat or a dog, the process of making your own chicken feed can be pretty tough. I tried feeding my birds purely homemade chow for a year, and I was more stressed than I ever thought was possible. I lost too much time in coming up with the food for the chickens.

However, the biggest pro here is that you know that your birds are getting the proper nutrition that they need.

If they need adjustments in their chicken feeding routine and nutritional content of their food, it’s easier for you to adapt. And it’s also cheaper since you’re using items that you’d usually use at home anyway, you don’t really end up spending that much more.

Personally, though, I use a mix of the two methods. Store-bought feed is specifically formulated to mesh with the needs of almost any chicken breed, so even if you’re not secure about what the feed contains, you know your birds are getting what they need.

The nutrients they lack, I make up for by making chicken feeding routines that mix store bought feed and homemade chow.

But of course, the tricky part is finding the right method. My suggestion here is – experiment! You won’t discover the method that’s perfect for you and your chickens if you just stick to one way of feeding them.

You might think they’re doing okay, but somewhere along the line, you’ll discover that there were some nutrients vital to keep them as healthy and as happy as possible. It’s more efficient in the long run to have tried out a variety of methods and settling for just one unique method of caring for your chickens.

Happy Chicken Feeding.

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!

]]> http://raisingchickensecrets.com/chicken-coop-kits/feed/ 0 http://raisingchickensecrets.com/care-for-chickens/ http://raisingchickensecrets.com/care-for-chickens/#comments Sat, 27 Jun 2009 22:10:11 +0000 Chad Builder http://raisingchickensecrets.com/?p=247

Taking care of chickens, just like taking care of any living creature, caring for a chicken – or a brood of chickens – isn’t the simplest of tasks.

You will need to devote a huge chunk of your time to taking care of your birds, so it can become a problem if you’re not ready to commit to your birds.

But with enough time and exposure to the daily tasks of caring for chickens, it can become something that’s easy and routine.

Now, you probably aren’t raising your chickens for profit, although the idea may have occurred to you somewhere along the line. But if you’re new to bringing up your chickens, it’s a sure bet that you won’t have a very good idea of how to take care of them.

But then again, that’s what you’re here for. Read on, and find out how you can best take care of your birds. Let’s start with how you should bring up your chicks.

Caring for Baby Chicks

Taking care of chicks is a lot more taxing than caring for chickens that are fully grown. That’s because baby chicks aren’t capable of taking care of themselves yet. They’re like Lemmings that keep on walking until they hit a wall. Then they turn and walk off in another direction.

The best way to start taking care of your chicks is by finding them a place to stay. Don’t put them indoors – they emit a funky smell that you (or your family) won’t find pleasant at all. The best place to keep them is inside a box, or a similar box, with holes. We’ll call this the brooder.

Line the brooder with absorbent material (anything but newspaper – wood chips work well), and make sure that your water dish and feeder are solid materials that the chicks won’t be able to tip over easily, or poop on – although the latter’s rather hard to predict.

The most important thing to remember when you care for chicks is that you have to keep them warm. They’ll probably stay in the brooder for four to five weeks, so you want to make sure they have an adequate source of warmth. A 250-watt bulb is usually more than enough for this function – just make sure that the chicks aren’t too warm.

Caring for adult chickens

The difference between how you care for your chicks and how you care for chickens that are fully grown is like the sun and the moon. While you need to watch over chicks, you can actually leave your chickens alone for extended periods of time so long as you make sure they have adequate food and water.

This should only be done during extreme circumstances, of course. But that about covers fifty percent of what you need to do to watch over your chickens – make sure that they have enough food to eat (especially important if you have a lot of chickens!), and make sure that their water trough has a fresh supply.

Make sure that you spend enough time with your chickens in order to make sure that they don’t look sick or unhappy. Once you see a forlorn chicken, you need to take him to the vet immediately.

To properly care for chickens, you need to clean out their coop every month, although if you can take care of the chicken poop on a daily basis, this can make things easier for you; you won’t have to scrub the coop down completely every six months.

Happy chicken raising.

When we talk about a chicken breeder, there are two possible things we could be referring to. The first thing that this could connote is a person who breeds chickens. This person is the guy newcomers to the chicken breeding scene go to when they’re thinking of choosing what kind of chicken they should grow.

He’ll be able to help you choose from among the various breeds that are right for you, and if you’re nice, he’ll probably start you off with the first egg in your coop.

The second thing a chicken breeder can be is a mature hen that is capable of laying fertilized eggs. This is a very literal interpretation of the term chicken breeder (since it is a chicken that can breed). Needless to say, one type of breeder grows chickens, while the other kind is a real live chicken that lays eggs that will hatch into chicks.

Hens and Roosters

Of course, it takes two chickens to tango. You can’t have a fertilized egg if all you have are hens. These birds alone can’t become breeders if you don’t have male chickens – roosters – around. The roosters will be the ones responsible for making sure that the eggs your hens lay will hatch. But how can you tell a hen and a rooster apart?

When they’re young  -  less than four months of age – you’ll discover that it’s very hard to tell them apart. One of the best ways to figure out which is a cockerel (a young rooster) and a pullet (a young hen) is the way these chicks act. The more aggressive the bird, the likelihood that it’s a cockerel is bigger.

So how does a breeder get her eggs pregnant?

When the hen is about to lay an egg, the rooster will mount her. The organ roosters use to fertilize eggs can be found inside the part of the chicken they use to excrete waste. Upon mounting the hen, this organ will extend into the orifice where chicken eggs come from, and fertilize the egg.

Chicken breeders will usually find that a single rooster for twelve hens will pretty much be enough. Of course, it depends on the breed of chickens you have. Some breeds lay eggs often, while others have irregular egg-laying patterns.

How do you make sure that an egg is fertilized?

Once your hen lays a new egg, you can use a process called candling to find out. Get the egg, and hold it up against a light source – like a light bulb, or a candle (hence the name). If the egg is fertilized, the embryo should show up.

Fertilized or not, however, a chicken breeder will sit on the egg. So if you’re not expecting eggs to hatch, make sure that you remove all new eggs from the nest box in order to avoid any accidents that will result in the egg getting crushed.

A Trustworthy Breeder?

About the human breeders – the only way you can be sure about whether or not you can trust them is to give them a shot.

But you can do some research beforehand. Ask your local grocers where they get their eggs from. If a particular hatchery stands out, then go pay this place a visit and ask the owner about chicken breeders. More likely than not, the man himself will be able to give you eggs for hatching unless you’re after a very specific breed.

There’s a long list of chicken coop blueprints you can choose from if you know where to look. For any enterprising poultry farm beginner, this abundance of plans and layouts is godsend, since people seriously don’t know what to do when there aren’t any instructions around to follow.

Basically, having blueprints for your chicken coops will save you the trouble of having to figure out how your chicken coop will look like.

If you’re the type of person who’d rather not bother with the process of designing the chicken coop that will house your birds, this will work very well for you.

Of course, there will be people out there who would rather come up with their own design. This is a plus, but it will have to entail one very important thing.

This is the fact that you will need to posses the basic skills necessary in figuring out how to build a structure. It may sound easy enough, but if you want a really good chicken coop, it pays to know what you need to do.

Either way you go, you will eventually end up having to implement whatever the blueprints say. This is the hard part. See, no matter how brilliant your blueprints are, if you don’t know how to put the plans into action, you sure won’t get anywhere. So building from the blueprints is another kettle of fish altogether.

What kind of blueprint?

If you’re just going to go and steal – er, borrow – somebody’s idea for a beautiful chicken coop, you will have to look for these plans first, right? But the question here is where to find them.

The easiest answer to this question is the Internet. Forums for chicken breeders and enthusiasts are bound to have people who can lend you their chicken coop blueprints, or point you to the right direction for your query. If you’re an enterprising chap, try to search for blueprints cold – see what a simple Google search will yield, and take it from there.

Alternately, you can go to your local hatcheries and poultry farms, and ask them for their own designs. This might even get you some helping hands.  If you become good friends with the chicken farmer, that might be the extra push you need to make sure that your chicken farm flourishes.

The risk-taker’s dilemma

You’re pretty brave if you decide to come up with the plans yourself. Either that, or you’re an architect. Whichever it is, creating your own set of drawings for your chicken coop blueprints will help ensure that the coop fits exactly where you want it to fit. If you’re anal about matching designs, you can even make it look like an extension of your own house.

But let’s be frank here. To be able to come up with your own design, you need to have a grasp of how to create structures that are both functional AND elegant.

If you can’t draw to save your life, your blueprints might end up looking like a kid’s drawing – no carpenter will be able to implement that without long hours of interpretation, and if something goes wrong, who’ll be at fault?

That’s right, you will.

So before you decide to take matters into your own hands, make sure that you’re at least capable of transposing physical measurements into something that your carpenter can understand.

It’s not that hard, you can do it!

Lots of hatchery owners probably know just how important caring for chickens is for the success of their business. These guys have years – for some, decades – of experience in the field, and they’ve probably gone through a series of trials that have helped them fine-tune the way they take care of their brood.

In contrast, you aren’t.

As I’ve pointed out time and again throughout these tutorials,you wouldn’t be here if you knew what you needed to do – in this instance, you wouldn’t be here if you knew how to take care of chickens.

And while it may sound like the easiest task there is – people always say that with enough experience, you can actually leave chickens to go about their business on their own – if you’re uninformed on what you need to do with the chickens at a certain juncture, there’s a big chance that you’ll end up killing your brood without meaning to.

Leave them alone – but don’t leave them

The concept that you can leave your chickens alone and they wouldn’t know the difference isn’t that far off the mark. The truth is, you can leave your chickens for extended periods of time without having to worry about their health and safety.

So long as you leave enough food and water to last them for as long as you’re away, caring for chickens while you’re absent is very possible.

But then again, you don’t really want to do this too much. This is because of the natural tendency of chickens to wander about.

These animals are smart, but they’re not brilliant.   It’s rather easy for them to do stupid things like fly out of the chicken coop on a whim. If you happen to live in an area that’s heavily populated with chicken predators, a breach in your chicken coop can be deadly for your brood.

Another reason why you don’t want to neglect caring for chickens personally is the same as with dealing with any other living creature: there’s something about being up close and personal that makes a big difference.

If you see them for at least thirty minutes a day, you can see how your chickens are getting along. You can spot the birds that aren’t feeling well earlier, and address the situation in a timely manner.  This is also a more efficient way of collecting newly-laid eggs.

What routine should you follow?

Ideally, the daily routine should involve you going to the coop to refill their feed and water boxes. This is of utmost importance; a happy chicken is a well-fed chicken. Make this the very first thing you do upon entering the chicken coop.

Caring for chickens also entails checking their status on a daily basis. Do any of your birds look sickly or sad? Learn how to tell your chickens apart, and spend some time trying to understand their moods.

To make sure that the chickens are laying eggs regularly, you want to make sure that your hens are healthy and happy, and once you miss out on a hen that isn’t feeling as chipper as it should, your supply of eggs will drop noticeably. Once this happens, find out which chicken is producing less eggs, and observe it for a period of time.

I personally recommend cleaning out the coop on a daily basis, even if it’s just picking up after your birds. But normally, general coop cleaning should be done on a monthly basis.

Don’t worry, just because you’re skimping on the clean-up doesn’t mean that you’re not caring for chickens well enough. But the rule of thumb here is – the smaller the coop, the more often you’ll have to clean up after your birds.

You’ll probably have to get used to getting all these things right for some time. Don’t worry – Rome wasn’t built in a day, and chances are that you won’t perfect your own style right away.

Just keep at it, and you’ll soon have things figured out. If you’re still having a hard time, get in touch with your local hatchery, or shoot me an email – I’ll see what I can do to help you out.

You might think you’ve seen it all, but when you’re looking for the perfect backyard chicken coop for your brood of egg-laying birds, it’s easy to get lost in the various designs that stores will have in stock.

If you really don’t know what to look out for, there’s a chance that you’ll let the storekeeper sway you with words.

That is the reason why most people end up buying things they don’t really need.

The idea is to make a list of the things you think are important to consider in a chicken coop. And if you think that this is an easy endeavor, think again – you’ll soon discover that obtaining a chicken coop is actually an infinitely more difficult task than you initially thought it to be!

But don’t worry. With the right guidance, you can make this phase in creating your own personal backyard hatchery easier for both you and your chickens.

1. What do you need to remember?

First and foremost, the most important thing to consider is just how big your backyard chicken coop should be. Let’s face it; you don’t want to crowd your chickens inside a space that’s much too small for them.

This will lead to a lot of problems in sanitation and ventilation, and this in turn could result in your chickens getting sick, and that’s the last thing that you want. Get a chicken coop that isn’t too small. Bigger coops are ideal, so long as you can fit them in your backyard.

The next thing you want to take note of is just what kind of materials you will be using for your intended chicken coop. Does that sound like too much trouble for a house you’re going to be keeping chickens in?

That’s hardly the case! You need to remember that your geographical location’s local weather might not exactly agree with your chickens, so you want to keep them indoors when the weather goes bad.

But if your birdhouse is made of things that will easily fall apart from the assault of the elements or from attacks by local chicken predators, then it doesn’t take an expert to tell you that you might want to reconsider your choice, right?

2. Should you build your own, or buy a pre-made chicken coop?

Once you have a rough idea of what your coop should be like, it’s time to decide on whether or not you should buy a pre-made birdhouse or make your own from scratch. The difference isn’t that great, so this question is more or less relative to what you’d prefer.

The good thing about building your own coop is that you’ve got the home court advantage, so to speak. With exact measurements of your backyard, chicken coops that you build from scratch will be an exact fit in the space you have available.

The best thing about this option is that you have full control over what goes into your chicken coop, and how big you can make it.

If you decide to buy a pre-made coop, though, you’re saving yourself the trouble of having to build it yourself. While you might be less secure with a coop you bought from a store, you can rest knowing that it’s very hard to find a coop that will easily fall apart – these things aren’t made from Ikea. Just remember the notes you made on what you need, and you’ll be fine.

3. Don’t panic

Seriously, a backyard chicken coop isn’t something you should lose sleep over.

Just remember to consider everything before buying or making your own birdhouse, and you should be okay. If you’re still not sure, go to your local hatchery and ask the owners for more tips on hunting for the perfect chicken coop for your backyard.