Coop and Poop but the Chickens are CUTE!

While the babies have been inside growing and hanging out under the heat lamp, Eric and I have been hard at work putting together their new home. And by Eric and I being hard at work I mean mostly Eric. 😉 Thankfully, though we no longer have Penny, we have lots of containment items from when we had her! We had a 6×8 chain link outdoor pen with a door that was no longer in use. We removed one of these sides to install the coop at the open end. By doing this the chickens have a good bit of area to cluck around and the coop isn’t taking up any ground space. We then took plywood and 2x4s to fashion the bones of the coop. The roof of the coop is on hinges to allow us access to the nesting boxes and eggs.

 

We made upper level nesting boxes and roosting/hangout space on the bottom. With the pen having a door and the coop having the hinged roof, cleaning is a breeze.

 

Like the idea of a removable pan in a dog crate, we created the same concept in the coop to make cleaning easy.

Due to our semi-rural location, we do have predators like skunks, fox, and snakes. EEK! To add extra layers of protection, we added tiny wire fencing around the entirety of the pen/coop about 2 feet high to make getting in extremely hard and our chickens can’t quite poke their heads out. The whole structure is also sitting on 4x4s to deter diggers from getting under the fencing. Essentially- Predator proof.

The girls will finally be getting to move into their new home by the end of the week! Now that they have had a solid 2 weeks or so under the lamp, they have grown almost double since we got them and my 2 blondies are going red!