I Love My Refurbished Chicken Coop - Post #1

A couple of months back my husband and I made the decision to tear our back porch off the house. We saw that underneath was a concrete patio and the wood deck was rotting, badly. The previous owners had built it, but never stained or protected the wood. We did some work when we moved in, but it seemed to be too little too late. This has turned out to be a wonderful blessing! From the wood we have built garden boxes, small projects and our amazing new chicken coop.

There is still some work to do in the Spring, when the weather is more cooperative for painting. We inherited these chicks, so we clearly have to build them a home.

This is my daughter pushing the cart with the few supplies we had to buy. It was about $100 in supplies. We ended up making a couple more trips for about $25 each.

Here is the beginning of framing it in. The legs, base and some of the framing wood is pulled from the deck. New studs were purchased on our first run to fill in the 2x4s. The deck didn't have a lot of 2x4s, mostly 2x8s and 1x6s.

This is my favorite part of the coop. My sweetie designed and built a nesting box I could access from the patio, just my short self.

Here's the inside, with a 2x8 board separating it into 2 boxes. I plan to hang a curtain giving it a little more privacy. But we have had one chicken (Mike) pay an egg in it already!

Here is the inside with the cool roost I built when my sweetie was still in bed in the morning. I'm super proud of it. :-) I also painted the floor with a bunch of sample paints I have remaining from painting the house. I just tossed them all together, not caring about the color.

Here's where we are right now. We have most of the siding, but we ran out of boards. We're going to have to grab couple 1x6 boards to wrap that up, but we covered the holes with plastic for the time being. 

Here's how they slept the first night transitioning from the old coop. I blocked them from the old one, putting the new chicks in that one. Two chickens slept in the new nesting boxes and the other two slept here, in the open door. Tonight, I think I'm going to block them inside as it gets to about 30 degrees at night right now.