How To Build A Chicken Coop? That is the question!

Are you thinking of building a new Chicken Coop? Wondering where to start? There is so much information when you start to search about the type of material you should use, the size of the hen house, the size of the outdoor run, and even do have have windows or not? The list goes on and on! Have you ever built your own home or completed some sort of home renovation? Once the project is complete and you actually use the space, you usually think of things you could have done differently. This was the same for us once we started using the coop for our chickens (I often call them 'the girls')!

Where we live in Ontario the temperature during the winter months can be quite cold. It is extremely important that your coop is free of drafts. Our coop is fully insulated but not heated. Our chickens managed well in their coop last winter with no heat. The only thing heated in the coop is their water dish. If you decide to heat your coop you would need to ensure you have some sort of back up heating system. This is necessary as if you have a power outage you will need a generator to ensure the temperature does not change too drastically during the power outage. If the coop is heated your chickens would not be climatized to below freezing temperatures and this could be fatal for your flock.

In this video you will see how we built our coop. We will also give you some suggestions on things that we would do differently the next time. Our coop is a perfect size for our girls but it is not big enough to add any additional chickens. Our girls are free range chickens so they have lots of opportunity to be outside of their coop during the day. Even last winter they often ventured outside even on the coldest days!

Since this video we have added an additional run to the coop as well. Check out the video below to see what else we added for extra space for the girls! I hope this saves you some time and gives you some ideas so you can build a coop to meet your needs on your farm or homestead!

---

Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube channel so you can keep up to date with what we are doing on the farm!