I Built the Most Convenient Backyard Chicken Coop

Hey everybody, I'm just out here at the backyard and I've got the chicken coop here and I've got to make a little bit of an adjustment

I'm going to explain that in just a second. I thought this would be a cool opportunity to show you the chicken coop I built just last fall and why I set it up the way I did, et cetera

So I'm going to make the repair and I'm also going to give you a little bit of a tour of the chicken coop

First things first though, if I'm going to work on this, I've got to let the room out

and before I do that, I have to cover up this plant. Otherwise, for some reason, that's the one

They just love to pick apart. So we're going to use a wheelbarrow and tip it over the plant

We'll cover it up. As long as we make sure we uncover it before we're done, we'll be all good

Okay, over to the chicken coop. Come on. There you go. Sunrise must be inside

Laying an egg. Oh, there she is. All right, there's the girls. Here's the coop itself, right, where they can hang out

Obviously, there's the, we've got, this is the box where they lay and they do it like really well

We've never had an issue. We put some of these wooden eggs in there so you can see the three darker ones are wooden eggs

And those were in the beginning to kind of prompt them to lay there, but they also seem to

have the added benefit of preventing them from eating their own eggs, which hens can be

can do if you don't collect their eggs very quickly. I've never really had that problem, but a lot of

people do. So by having those wooden eggs, if they ever do kind of peck at them, they're like

oh, no, these aren't, these aren't anything I can eat. So anyway, back to this at hand. So

they don't hang out inside almost ever. And we weren't sure why, because before we had this other

chicken coop, I'll show it to you here. And we put a little bit of a chicken run around it. And

they hung out inside there a lot. And so I was wondering what was going on. And what I figured out is

I think they're getting way too hot. I don't have any sort of window. I just have that door

And so they don't get decent airflow. So today I'm going to cut a window here in the top

I mean, it's been months of this, even in the winter. They hung out only outside. And I kind of

get it. It's kind of fun. They love to roost and stuff. So being on these sticks is a lot of fun for them

So that's what I'm going to do. But before I go and start cutting that window, let's start with a little bit of a tour

So here you go. You can see basically the whole chicken coop, chicken run combo all in one

I built it to be four feet by eight feet. That worked out really well for the three chickens that we've had

We first bought a small chicken coop. Again, the same one I mentioned before, a real cheap one off Amazon

It said it could handle three or four chickens. But really, that was only as a little coop, right

They still needed some area outside the coop to run around in. You couldn't just close them in there and expect them to hang out in that tiny space

At least, I wouldn't, you know, maybe at one of these. these chicken processing places They cool with that but I not right So I wanted them to have a bit of a run So I modeled this a little bit after that chicken coop mixed with a chicken run chicken coop concept that my parents built over at their place

for many more chickens. They can easily have 12, 14, probably 16, maybe 20 chickens in theirs if they really wanted to

normally up to about a dozen. So that's the size I went with. The coop itself, the enclosure, is a bit smaller

It's about 2 feet by 3 feet plus the box here. on the outside. Now, let me show you some of the cool things that I built into this

First of all, something that my dad doesn't have on his that some of you might be wondering

about is why did I put a roof inside over the little chicken coop? Why didn't I just build it all

the way to the top, give them more inside space to roost and stuff? I did that because on our old

chicken coop, you know, we had that little coop and then we built a run around it and I, you know

enclosed the top, but just with mesh and stuff. But we found that one of their favorite places

to be was literally on the roof. of the old coop. And so my wife insisted, she's like, you have to build a roof on the inside

And they do. All three of them hang out together on the roof of this chicken coop like all the time

It's one of our favorite places to be. So that's what I have. So it's really kind of, kind of cool

because they have a lot of levels inside there. You can tell they hang out there because there's

always poop up there. We clean it off a ton. I built, you know, this, the box here for them to

lay eggs in. It's on hinges. Makes sense. So I can open it up. I was going to put a latch on it

I haven't really needed to. Animals have a hard time getting in there because this lid's heavy enough

I built all this out of OSB. It's a lot cheaper than other sheathing. So I just went with OSB

Then I built this feeder box. This is based off of a similar concept that our friends over in eastern Idaho have

They have a coop like this, and it's pretty self-sustaining. So in this box, believe it or not, I can fit a 50-pound bag of food

Normally I'll do about half a bag at a time, just in case I'll do. I run into any problems

You can see the pellet feed that I have right now. I sometimes switch back and forth between grains and stuff

But then on the front, and this is where you gotta see, on the front, basically I just

out of wood, I cut holes and made that a lot like the metal feeder that I had before

So I got four holes there, just cut out of the wood. At first I thought I might need a little bit more friction that it would just flow too easily

And so I actually made sort of a shelf. there and I stuck that metal feeder in there so that the feed could come in one side and out the

other, but it was too much friction. And so the feed wasn't getting through. So then when I removed that

metal thing and I just put essentially that board over the top with holes in it, this has been

perfect. The only time we ever have trouble with the feed getting through is if it gets wet

which doesn't normally happen because we have this roof over the top, it's just not going to get

wet. But this spring, when the sprinklers first came on, the sprinkler over here was just

hitting just inside there which made the chicken coop super smelly because all the ground there got you know poop all over it But also it was getting some of the food a little bit wet so it would

swell and get stuck right there in the bottom. So we were every day having to come kind of clean

it out. And anyway, I had to fix that problem pretty fast. All right, I'm going to show you the

next really cool feature, but first, let's get to work a little bit on cutting this hole. For that

I'm just going to drill a hole to get started in a corner and then use a little bit

a jigsaw to just cut out a nice little rectangle and hopefully that will resolve the issue and

they'll like hanging out inside. I drilled out that first hole from the inside because I do have

a couple of boards going across to roost on on the inside and I wanted to make sure that the

bottom of the window was above. Hey, sunrise. I wanted to make sure that it was a

above those roosting sticks and so I wanted to do it from the inside for the first one

So that's the first. Now I can use the jigsaw. Okay, it's going to get a little noisy in here, Sunrise

All right, I'm going to start with that. We'll see how that does, see if they start to hang out in there a little bit more, especially

when it's like cold or windy or something outside. They still seem to hang out outside

They seem to prefer it. All right, now back to the tour. The next thing's not going to seem like that big of a deal, but these are literally just

branches from the willow tree in our yard that I have going across

You can see that one's on the far side over there, screwed in to the post, and then

Then likewise I have one screwed in on this end and they just hang out there all the time

I have that short one down there that they climb on a bit, but it's also supporting that PVC pipe

We've also got some of these little toys, a little swing. They don't really roost on the swing because it moves a lot, but they do play around

It's kind of fun. Don't know how necessary those are, but they're kind of fun

They also roost on this board. This board is actually a support

You can see that there's a post here and it's supporting this

It's kind of like the small beam, supporting some of the weight of that

So it allowed me to not have a post on the ground underneath that corner, which is kind of cool

So it's much more open space for them inside. All right. The next really cool thing on this chicken coop is also something I got from my friends over in eastern Idaho

They just used a water container of some kind. They hung theirs on the back of the coop

I'm using a five-gallon bucket right now just sitting on blog. I thought about building a platform for it I haven yet But I can fill this all the way up with water And then I have a one inch PVC pipe And then on the bottom of that pipe if you look really closely zoom in here a little bit you can see those little red things Those are little nipples I just bought at a farm supply

store nearby, nearby, D&B supply. They're red because red's a color that's supposed to be

attractive to chickens. They're, and birds in general. They're supposed to see it and want to peck at it

Although for some reason, my birds tend to peck it green a lot more. They like leaves and grass and stuff

We give them red and half the time they don't. Although they love tomatoes. Not the plant, but the tomato fruit itself

Anyway, so these red nipples, I just drill little holes for each of those and screw them into the PVC pipe and the water flows and it's awesome

Now, there's a downside to this one. That was in the winter when it got really cold

I had a heater for this that sat in the five-gallon bucket and the water never froze

but in the pipe, it froze. And so I was coming out all the time

I ended up having to just use a normal chicken waterer and I just have to replace it every day

So either I need to run some kind of heater coiled down the length of that PVC pipe

or I could rethink it. Another way to do it is to put the watering bucket inside the coop up

so it's either hanging or sitting up on top of something and then you can put nipples around the bottom of a bucket

So if I were to use this bucket as an example, I would put them like right there, right there, right there, just kind of near the bottom

but on the sides. And then they'll come drink out of the bucket and you get the same benefit

The upside of the way I've done it is I can do all my feeding and all my watering from outside of this whole chicken run

Just makes it really easy to maintain. Makes it so I don't have to go in there all the time every time I need to feed them and water them like ever

But the cool thing is even if you're not. you have to do this on the inside, if you use a big bucket like this, that water lasts a couple of

weeks for these three chickens. You know, for the dozen or so chickens my parents have at their

place, it's going to last about a quarter of the time that this one does, but easily two full

weeks out of this every single time. Kind of nice that I don't have to fill it up that often

So even if you had to go inside the coop to fill it, it's just not the big of a deal to only do

every couple weeks. I definitely let the chickens out a lot more often than that. So for all

of you who have chickens or all of you who want to have chickens. First of all, I'd love to

hear your feedback on this coop design. What do you think of it? It seemed like a good idea

Are there other things you think that I missed? Are the things you think I maybe did wrong

On the flip side of that, for any of you who are, again, interested or considering getting

chickens or have questions of any kind about the chicken coop, things I maybe didn't show very closely

let me know in the comments below. I'd love to follow up and be able to provide you with

all the information I can, whether it's about chickens or anything else preparedness. Just let me know in the comments. Thanks for watching