This year we decided that we wanted to get some new chickens. After looking at the cost of some of the big box store chicken coops, I decided it'd be much better, and much cheaper, to just re-purpose and old shed we weren't using into a chicken coop.
The interior of the chicken coop is 12' wide x 14' deep x 8' tall.
The first thing I did was build a pen to go inside the coop to house the chicks until they were big enough to have access to the full coop. Here's a look at what that pen looks like now. The chicks in there now aren't the originals. We ended up with 7/9 of our original chickens being roosters so we got rid of them all except for 2 roosters and the 2 hens. In this little pen now is 12 new pullets. I'm actually pretty certain one of them is a roo but more on that in another thread.
This little chick pen is 6' wide x 2' 6" deep x 4' 9" tall.
The next thing I did was to work on building a door on the front of the shed coop. We originally planned on free-ranging these chickens so I built the door with a small access door in the bottom. I also built the door so that the top would open separately from the bottom so that once the chickens got big enough we could just open the top, leaving the entire bottom closed, so the chickens could fly in and out and nothing could follow then in through the little access door.
We later decided not to free-range our chickens, for a few reasons. #1) We grow a garden most of the year and we didn't want the chickens digging up the baby veggies while scratching around in the garden. #2) We live right on a state highway and didn't want to risk the chickens getting hit by a car or, even worse, causing an accident.
So, I built another access door at the back of the coop for the run. You can see the access door in the first picture here. I used a pulley, some rope, and some PVC pipe to make it so that the access door could be opened and closed from outside the coop. This works out in case we have a rooster that's a little aggressive we can just open the door from outside, and close it again once he's outside, then go into the coop to do our business.
The run we built outside is 43' 6" long, 12' wide, and about 4' tall. We do intend on rebuilding the run this fall. The plan is to double the width of this run, making it 24' wide. We're also going to use a stiffer wall (something like cattle panels with the smaller holes) and using our current wall material as the new ceiling material. We're also going to build a ceiling on one end of the run that extends off the top of the coop (where the tarp is now) to give the chickens a fully shaded area outside, with a much higher ceiling, to hang out in. The plan is to also add a few fun things in there for them such as a wooden tree to climb, a chicken swing, and some other things I find on this forum that others have done in the past.
Once the chickens were venturing out of the little chick pen more we decided to close the door on that pen, basically kicking them out. Before that, though, I wanted to make sure they had a new place to roost, other than inside the little chick pen, so I built this roost for them. It's simply attached to the back of the coop wall and to the ceiling of the coop.
There are 4 2x4s here that are all 5' 6" long, so roughly 17' of linear roosting space. The four chickens all roost at the very top and barely take up half of the space of that one board.
I also built them a ladder to use to get up to the roost. Yeah, they don't use that anymore. 
Finally, once they started to get a little older, I built them some laying boxes. These boxes are all roughly 11" wide, 12" deep, and 14" tall. I put a ceramic egg in every other box so they'd know what they were for, in case they couldn't figure it out on their own. I certainly didn't want them laying in the hay on the floor, or outside. Seemed to work because both of our momma hens are laying in the boxes now.
So, there you have it. That's our little shed coop. Looking forward to hearing any input y'all have on things I'm doing wrong, or things I should try out.
Thanks for looking!
The interior of the chicken coop is 12' wide x 14' deep x 8' tall.
The first thing I did was build a pen to go inside the coop to house the chicks until they were big enough to have access to the full coop. Here's a look at what that pen looks like now. The chicks in there now aren't the originals. We ended up with 7/9 of our original chickens being roosters so we got rid of them all except for 2 roosters and the 2 hens. In this little pen now is 12 new pullets. I'm actually pretty certain one of them is a roo but more on that in another thread.
This little chick pen is 6' wide x 2' 6" deep x 4' 9" tall.
The next thing I did was to work on building a door on the front of the shed coop. We originally planned on free-ranging these chickens so I built the door with a small access door in the bottom. I also built the door so that the top would open separately from the bottom so that once the chickens got big enough we could just open the top, leaving the entire bottom closed, so the chickens could fly in and out and nothing could follow then in through the little access door.
We later decided not to free-range our chickens, for a few reasons. #1) We grow a garden most of the year and we didn't want the chickens digging up the baby veggies while scratching around in the garden. #2) We live right on a state highway and didn't want to risk the chickens getting hit by a car or, even worse, causing an accident.
So, I built another access door at the back of the coop for the run. You can see the access door in the first picture here. I used a pulley, some rope, and some PVC pipe to make it so that the access door could be opened and closed from outside the coop. This works out in case we have a rooster that's a little aggressive we can just open the door from outside, and close it again once he's outside, then go into the coop to do our business.
The run we built outside is 43' 6" long, 12' wide, and about 4' tall. We do intend on rebuilding the run this fall. The plan is to double the width of this run, making it 24' wide. We're also going to use a stiffer wall (something like cattle panels with the smaller holes) and using our current wall material as the new ceiling material. We're also going to build a ceiling on one end of the run that extends off the top of the coop (where the tarp is now) to give the chickens a fully shaded area outside, with a much higher ceiling, to hang out in. The plan is to also add a few fun things in there for them such as a wooden tree to climb, a chicken swing, and some other things I find on this forum that others have done in the past.
Once the chickens were venturing out of the little chick pen more we decided to close the door on that pen, basically kicking them out. Before that, though, I wanted to make sure they had a new place to roost, other than inside the little chick pen, so I built this roost for them. It's simply attached to the back of the coop wall and to the ceiling of the coop.
There are 4 2x4s here that are all 5' 6" long, so roughly 17' of linear roosting space. The four chickens all roost at the very top and barely take up half of the space of that one board.
I also built them a ladder to use to get up to the roost. Yeah, they don't use that anymore. Finally, once they started to get a little older, I built them some laying boxes. These boxes are all roughly 11" wide, 12" deep, and 14" tall. I put a ceramic egg in every other box so they'd know what they were for, in case they couldn't figure it out on their own. I certainly didn't want them laying in the hay on the floor, or outside. Seemed to work because both of our momma hens are laying in the boxes now.
So, there you have it. That's our little shed coop. Looking forward to hearing any input y'all have on things I'm doing wrong, or things I should try out.
Thanks for looking!
