Building Coop Photo Gallery
We basically followed a plan that was on the internet, but it has been taken down now, so we can't give you the link. After making the coop and doing a bit of research, we made a few changes.
We moved the lower roosting bar back a bit.
We replaced the upper roosting bar with two new roosting bars going front to back, so that they would be wide enough for the chickens feet, as we read that they don't curl their feet around the roost, and covering their feet with their body at night keeps their feet frostbite free in cold weather.
We also made a different nest box. We wanted to lower it as much as possible and still be able to use our egg door, as we read the the nest boxes should be lower than the roosts. Lowering it made it so we could also make it a bit wider. (We couldn't manage "lower than the roosts," but we did manage "same level.")
We made a new feeder out of a 5 gallon bucket and placed their food outside. This makes it so it is cleaner and also allows us to close it up at night to help deter the vermin from eating the chicken feed.
We also made a secondary water source outside of the chicken coop. We still have the original water dispenser in the coop so they will not be without water when they are in their coop, but they seem to like the outside water source better. It is definitely cleaner.
We changed how we keep the front of the coop open during the day. We rigged a chain to support it as the chickens kept knocking over the support post, locking themselves out of the coop.
Building Run Photo Gallery
After a while, we determined that we needed to build a chicken run around the coop to give the chickens more room, while protecting our garden from the chickens. We basically built a 10x10 structure. (Slightly off due to calculation errors.) Three walls are basically the same pattern and then we put a door on the front side. We also put on a roof that is screened across the top and then added another layer over half of it where we covered it with corrugated roofing panels. We have been having enough rain/snow that the run is a muddy mess, so we may decide to put roofing panels on the rest of it.
