Chicken Coop Ideas!!!

hi guys this is Troy the Abel farmer in this video we are going to address how I got into chickens and also I am going to do a tour of my chickens in my chicken run so anyway let's uh let's get into that my wife and I have discussed in the past that you know it would be pretty neat to have some chickens down the road and it just so happened that my mom and my stepdad were getting married so therefore they had to combine all their things and my stepdad had this storage shed that he needed to sell and asked if I was interested I thought hey we could turn that into a chicken coop so I went ahead and I purchased that off of him and we brought it over here and dropped it off and I didn't know the first thing about chickens and I just did tons of research a bunch of youtube videos trying to learn everything I can to figure out how to make the perfect chicken coop for me one thing that I wanted to address was a lot of people will come out in the mornings and they will let their chickens out and then in the evenings they lock their chickens in and the way my work schedule worked out was I leave about five o'clock in the morning and it is pretty much dark year-round at five o'clock in the morning and I don't get home until about a quarter after 7:00 and then the winter it's after dark at that time so I didn't know how it was feasible to come out every single day let my chickens out put my chickens away let him out put them away and I wanted to avoid that if I could so what I decided to do was I was going to allow the chickens to have access to their coop 24 hours a day but what about predators we leave that door open 24 hours a day it be nothing for something to go in there and just kill them so I decided I need to come up with a way to make my run completely secure to where I could trust having that door open all the time so the first thing I did was I got a strong welded wire fence that you see here so I got a hundred and fifty feet of the welded wire fence the next thing that I did was I decided to run a single electric wire about six inches off the ground all the way around and then I knew that the next weakest part of the attack was from above there's a reason that call red-tail Hawks chicken Hawks don't fly in here and they will kill them so I put a poultry net completely over the top of this to prevent owls and hawks from going in and killing the birds and it also keeps the birds inside which therefore protects them from anything that may be looking for a free lunch the next thing that I did because I figured okay the electric wire would shock anybody anything that came up to it such as a dog or a raccoon or something like that what about something smaller so I thought what about a mink and because I do live next to the creek makes tend to travel the tricks so what I did was about a foot up from the bottom I put chicken wire all the way around it would prevent a mink from being able to crawl under the wire through now will they still be able to get in I don't know I've had this over a year and it hasn't been a problem another thing I did was I bent that chicken wire inward to prevent anything from being able to dig under the fence so the whole goal here is to completely fortify this chicken run to where nothing can get in now it's been about 15 months and so far nothing has gotten into this chicken run alright so after I came up with the design then we went ahead and bought some egg-laying chickens when I say have chickens down the road I mean like maybe six or eight of them so we just went to the local farm store they had three different breeds of egg-laying chickens and we that's what we bought so we brought them home kids loved them and anyway it was on to building the rest of the coop all right to go into the run I have an electric wire for a fence here every time we go in we have to grab it and unhook and that is for the birds safety before we go in just to make sure I'm not liable for any chicken attacks and here we are inside now you see here we have a complete net which I ran these two by fours into the ground and and strung a rope from end to end clear into the coop and then stretch the poultry net over the top so to come over here you can see that I built this duck pond now I have an entire video on how I made this self-cleaning duck pond and I am going to put a link in the description below and you can check that out all right I also have a video on the maggot bucket the little chick that I ran over and the chicken tractor is inside of there and just trying to put it the use to produce protein for my birds I have a chicken swing that was kind of a waste of money honestly I've only seen them on there once or twice but my kids wanted it so I gave him I got a little roost here made from a 2x4 just something they could perch on outside and nothing fancy just a little perch my door here I have a motion detector a solar motion detector light that's just for convenience if I get in here after dark especially in the winter when I get home and it's already dark I have a little solar light above their chicken door you see here and that is the final line of defense if something were to get in well I decided that I wanted the hat let them have access to food from the outside of the coop so right here is their food access that I put a little roof over to help keep the to help keep the food nice and dry and that they come out here even if it's raining and not get soaked over here I used to have a water that linked to my rain barrel and I also have videos on my rain barrels I'll put a link to that below and I use this I use this rain barrel to run over into the coop with these chicken cups and it worked excellent until we got to winter and once winter got here the water froze and completely shattered my chicken cups so now their entire water source is the self-cleaning duck pond they all drink from it the water is nice and clean and my birds are nice and healthy now you see here this is always six chickens right six chickens well there's something that a lot of people have heard of called chicken math and let me tell you right now chicken math is a real thing and if you don't know what chicken math is I'll show you a couple pictures that explain chicken math chicken math is real it is a real thing you just can't help yourself once you get into chickens you realize how many cool different breeds there are you know you just kind of want to collect them all you know when you first get into this thing got chickens a chicken no big deal there's some awesome breeds and yeah I kind of gotten into that where I like a bunch of different breeds even if the sacrifice is a little bit on like the power egg-laying abilities I'd rather have several breeds that doesn't lay quite as good but I just really need to look at and some also some pretty ultra rare birds Thank You mo but some also also some pretty ultra rare birds the two that I like to I like to have what do you say we step inside the chicken coop and I'll show you in there alright let's come inside here alright we are inside of the chicken coop now the first thing I did was I built a loft in the back and the reason I put a loft in the back was because I wanted to have access to the feed right here close to right here inside the chicken tractor side I have to haul it around all the time but I had to make it to where the chickens couldn't get up there and poop all over everything and I built this fence in this gate that allows me to keep the chickens out of the places where I don't want them to be now another thing I did when I bought this storage shed is I knew that chickens needed ventilation so you see up here I added a gable vent and I also added vented soffit to allow better air flow inside of the chicken coop alright the next thing I'm going to talk about is my roosting bars I built the roosting bar out of these two by twos and you can see here I have two screws that hold this one in place so when I come in here I am able to simply lift this up and it swivels on a single screw over here and sit the roosting bar right there which gives me access to my nesting boxes and you can see here with my nesting boxes currently being used right now but it did was I bought these dish tubs from Walmart and I believe they're under $1 apiece and I got them because they're easily removable and you could just dump out any mess that you potentially could get and put some new chips in there and you're good to go another thing I do with the nesting box is I will actually put some diatomaceous earth underneath of it to help prevent any establishment of mites or any other kind of bugs that we don't want hair in the chicken coop another thing is I keep a school hanging in here so I can easily reach my loft and then I have a pitchfork here that I use to help help me clean help me clean the chicken coop when I need to now the next thing you might ask is how do I power this I don't have electric running from my house to my chicken coop so I had to come up with a way to run my electric fence and also run my light so what happened is my chickens went green we have a solar panel my research my young roosters are starting to get their voice you can tell but anyway what I did was I put a solar panel on the top now that solar panel gets a lot of Evening Sun and it charges up my battery inside the chicken coop and I'm going to show you some stills here so I did is I ran that solar panel to that battery and that is what runs my electric fence and it also runs my light on the inside alright guys I think that pretty much does it with the chicken coop tour you see me and my six chickens behind me are happy to bring that to you so anyway I hope you guys enjoyed the video you might have been wondering where I've been it's been about a week since I posted a video actually I did post another video and I knew I was walking the line on the YouTube rules and I posted a kind of a jokingly funny video that YouTube didn't appreciate and I violated some copyright rules so that video doesn't show up among my videos however if I link to it you can go see it and what I'm going to do is I'm going to link to that video below in the description of this video and I just want to warn you right now that if you're kind of sensitive to seeing some death with some permits then don't click on the video and just save yourself from being angry about it but I'm gonna put the video in the description and I want you guys check it out and just you know maybe you guys get a laugh out of it so this could be a big week we got a lot of butchering to do I got a lot of videos that I'm probably going to take here later in the week I'm actually take took the week off of work and I should be able to bring that to you so Moe so anyway I hope you guys liked this video please like it subscribe to my channel I would greatly appreciate that really would so I hope you enjoyed the rest of your day and I'll see you guys in the next video thanks for watching

Channel: The Able Farmer

Views: 85,044

Rating: 4.9292545 out of 5

Keywords: Chicken Coop Ideas, Chicken Coop, Best Chicken Coop, Chicken Run, Solar Chicken Coop, How to Build a chicken coop, Chicken Math, Chicken, Homesteading, Homestead, The Able Farmer, Duck Coop, Coop, Secure Coop, Coop Security

Id: 3FhsJBg58dg

Length: 13min 47sec (827 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 13 2019