TerrieMiller.com

On July 2, I got five new baby Americana chicks to add to my existing flock of two Barred Plymouth Rocks, hoping to end up with about five hens total after the inevitable goofs in chick sexing. (Sure enough, I’ve got at least one and up to three roosters in this new batch of five…)

So one of my projects this summer has been to build a new hen house on a budget.

Luckily, Sonoma County has the world’s greatest landfill. I’m not kidding…several waste diversion programs combine to form a treasure trove of useful materials for backyard projects. Our new hen house was made using almost all reclaimed lumber and materials (the exception being the 1×1 fence used for the bottom floor of the coop).

The sides are pieces of beautiful plywood siding I found at the used lumber area of the dump (I think I paid $2 each for them); the roof is some corrugated fiberglass that a friend had taken down at his house.

The frame and roosts are made out of recovered 2×4s.

The nest boxes were made using other plywood scraps I found at the dump’s recycled lumber area.

The back of the hen house was an amazing stroke of luck…I found a cupboard door at the dump which fits perfectly across the back, giving me easy access to the interior of the hen house for cleaning.

The front uses some old fence boards. And the coop itself is made out of a giant roll of 2×2 fencing that I found for a mere $20 (also at “recycle town” — the perpetual garage sale area at the Meecham Road dump). Why so cheap? Some gnarly grape vines had grown through it, making it impossible to unroll. Steve worked for a couple of hours removing the vines, saving us a couple hundred dollars on fencing.

I found the paint at our hardware store in the “goofs” pile, where mistakes in color mixing are kept and sold for cheap.

It took longer to make than I guessed, mostly because I didn’t work from a plan and don’t know real carpentry. The design was inspired in part by a larger hen house in the book Making Mobile Hen Houses, but ultimately I decided that I really wanted a bigger and better version of the Chick-N-Hutch that we’d been using. I used suggested measurements for things like roost size and spacing, nest box size, and overall hen house size from the mobile hen house book and also from Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens.

The design was simplified because I don’t need to shut my chickens in the hen house at night (so far, that is — knock on wood) because I have them in a completely fenced coop, and because that coop sits completely within the dog’s yard. Laika does a good job of deterring predators, rushing out her doggie door at night if she hears anything creeping around out there. When the two groups of chickens are combined, I’m planning to make a door along the yard fence side of the coop. That way I can allow the hens to free-range outside of the dog yard during the day (where they’re too much of a chase temptation), and have them stowed within the predator-safe zone at night.

All in all, I’m very happy with our new coop…and of course, the delicious eggs we get every day from our delightful backyard ladies!