Coop Project: Maken the Plunge & Getting Chickens

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Rock Home Isle

Crowing
12 Years
Apr 25, 2012
2,156
248
286
Northern Frontrange of Colorado
Here is the opener of my Chick/Chicken Thread.

As a little background to this project: My daughter's fiance has been bringing us several dozen home grown eggs everytime he returns from his visits to his family in South Dakota and its been nice getting farm fresh eggs....we've actually become quite spoiled with these fine quality eggs.

On a recent trip to the store, I just could not believe what prices for basic groceries have risen too. We've talked about starting a small flock for several years and finally decided to make the plunge and get a small flock of birds to provide the family with fresh eggs. My wife & I both had chickens when we were kids and the chickens do have a huge entertainment value besides the egg production aspects. I talked to the neighbors, and they are actually quite open at the prospects of fresh eggs should we have an excess, so we shouldn't have to much trouble disposing of any extra production. Their main concern is smell and garbage from the small flock.

Our community allows its citizens to have small flocks and we thought that this would be a benifit to our family to maintain a small flock of layer hens and serve to offset a few expenses. We've picked up 6 Buff Orpington Chicks & 2 Kaki Campbells Ducks some weeks ago. These little fellows were outside for the first time this last weekend; and have been spending their daytime hours outside ever since.

My wife and daughter wanted the Ducks. They both like to bake, and if you've ever had baked goods that were made using duck eggs in place of chicken eggs...well there is a very noticable difference. My wife also knows several ladies in the area that bake wedding cakes and such for a living, and one of their "secret ingredients" is to use duck eggs. I was torn between getting Runners and the Campbells, we settled on the Campbells.

While all this has been going on...I'm in the middle of building the Coop & Run for the small flock.

I'll post photos and show the progression of my project. If any of you have suggestions or ideas that you would like to share...that would be much appreciated.

I hope that you enjoy the thread as much as I'm sure that I'll enjoy posting to it.
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A couple of weeks ago I cleaned up under my deck so that I could place the coop and the run at this location. I'm only going to have 4 chickens, so I'm not to worried about mess and smell. But still, you never know.



Okay so its only mostly cleaned up. I'm using the railroad ties as a foundation to mount the coop and the fencing for the runs.
 
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The coop is mostly framed at this point. Pleanty of room for a flock of 4 chickens and 2 ducks. My current concern is that the ducks will make a wet mess inside the coop, and during the winter months a cold wet chicken is usually a dead chicken. The large opening is for my access door to the inside of the coop.


 
While all this planning & construction was going on I had my chicks brooding inside a 40 gallon breeder tank. The 40 breeder is a great tank for this as there is a high surface to volume ratio, providing the chicks with lots of room. I had the chicks on paper for the first week.


 
We have 6 Buff Orpington chicks. I've never had chickens without a few losses so I got a few extra, just in case. So far everyone looks to be healthy...knock on wood. If the time comes and I have more chickens than I can keep, I have a friend that also got chicks this spring and will take any extras off my hands. He's a good guy.


 
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