Green Garden Chicken's Deluxe Country Club Wood Chicken Coop

I love the improvements you made to this coop and I cannot agree more with your pros and cons. I started raising chickens 3 years ago and this is the coop I started with. It worked well for young chicks (I had 4) but they quickly outgrew it and then only used it as a nesting box which was fine because I had it inside a stall in my barn but when I was down to just 2 hens, I moved it outside and used it as their coop.

You're absolutely right...it is TINY and not good for any more than 2 adult chickens. There is no room, even with just the 2, to place a feeder and waterer inside the enclosed portion and if you're chickens are anything like mine, they don't like going out when the weather is terrible. The design is cute but in less than an hour they have no grass left so it truly does work best for free-ranging birds.

I currently have 2 five week old chicks in it inside the big run so they can be near the big girls but they still come in the house at night (in a large pet crate) as after having it outside for only about 9 months (spring-fall), it began leaking!! I had to move it back under cover for this past winter and that's when I began my plans for upgrading. I will suggest, if your run doesn't have a solid cover, to paint/seal your coop so you don't run into the same problem. The wood around the base also needs to be sealed as one section on mine rotted and split in no time.

Hi! Yep, the wood is pretty cheesy. It's hard to see, but we have it sitting on a 2 x 4 frame (with buried skirting) I hope that will stave off some rot. Once the whole thing weathers a bit more, we have two cans of stain/sealant stuff to coat everything with. One is some fancy brand, that we paid full price at Lowes for....so I hope it lasts. The second can is a lighter color we got on clearance for $5 at Home Depot. The cheapo can is just for the house...so we can use it liberally. It's almost clear, and we like the color of the house. The expensive stuff should (I hope) make the bare wood we used on the run close in color to what the house is. 2 cans is probably overkill, but I want to protect that cheapo wood as much as we can. We also have a 2 1/2 foot x 22 feet long piece of black steel roofing left over from our roof job last winter. We plan to snip it in 2, and cover the run above the living quarters with that, and then at some point add some fiberglass ripple roofing material we saw to the rest of the run. I am concerned about snow. For this winter we are probably just tarp-ing over the top of the run, and wrapping the lower portion of it with clear roll plastic. I hope that keeps some snow out, while still letting them get some fresh air.

If we had known we were actually sort of capable of building things (haha) we would have been better off just making something in the 1st place. Now that we see how a coop is supposed to look, we can hopefully upgrade when this thing falls apart. I didn't know a thing about chickens when we went into this...we watched a video on how to make a simple coop before we ordered it, and it looked complicated. Honestly after the fact I think our upgrade / run was just as complicated. But for now it's OK. I still have to re do the roosts. The one I made in the addition is too small, and the ones it came with are a hopeless mess, always falling down. I took them off. We want to add a pipe feeder and waterer soon, because interior space is still an issue. The big red plastic ones from TSC would never fit in this little thing. We're still using the canning jar chick ones.

I know exactly what you mean! I had no faith in my carpentry skills so I scoured sites like craigslist and some more local buy/trade sites for coops. They all seemed outrageously overpriced for very little space (I bought my starter coop when the model was fairly new and about $400). I wanted one that I could walk in and possibly large enough for feed storage as well. Used they were running between $500 and $2k...still for not much space and the lower cost coops were not walk-ins.

I expanded my search to include sheds but was still looking for something small enough so it could be moved easily if I wanted/needed to which brought my search to ice fishing shacks of all things. There were TONS of them listed in the spring when I was looking and found most to be half the cost of a coop with twice the space. Those things are built to withstand ridiculous weather conditions and are made to travel. I found a 4'x8' shanty that's insulated with a built in storage bench, a fold down counter and even a fold down bed for $250! It was a win/win for my girls and my wallet. I gutted it and was able to salvage most of the materials to finish it off the way I wanted. I picked up a couple of adorable second hand cottage style windows for $8 each, framed them out using salvaged 2"x3" and installed them myself. Every day it's looking more and more like a garden shed or even a tiny guest house instead of a shanty. I'm still tweaking it here and there to figure out what works best for both my flock and me and I'm still deciding what color to paint it but overall I couldn't be happier with it.

Now that there aren't any birds actually living in the starter coop, though I do put two chicks in there during the days who aren't ready to join the big girls yet, I may work on repairs so I can still use it as an isolation coop or brooder for future flock members. I like your idea of putting it on a 2x4 frame. That should certainly help in making it last longer.

I started with one very much like this, I knew nothing about keeping chickens, I wish I had looked in to it before I bought it.
I got 3 hens and to my mind it was too small, so I decided to buy a shed and convert it, I found it much better, more room and I can walk in, I added 2 more hens after that.
I sold the small coop for half the price I paid for it, I read on one thread, a lot of these coops show pictures of around 6 - 8 chickens in the run, but I read they use small chickens to take the photo to make the coop seem bigger.
I almost forgot, one night we had strong winds and it blew over, I woke the next morning to see the hens wondering around in the semi darkness, I felt so bad, it had rained as well but luckily there was a place for them to shelter.

i wonder if ANY prefab coops are worth their salt