DIY Reclaimed Wood Chicken Coop - Full Tour & Tips

[Music] do [Music] welcome back to jack in the garden today we're going to be talking about my chicken coop and it's one of these questions that i get the most frequently something that people want content on the most is chickens how to raise chickens how to care for them and so before we really get into more of that side of things let's talk about how to actually build a coop and what features and design considerations we made when we built our coop from reclaimed scrap lumber so before we uh get too deep into the design video oh hey tephra i wanted to give a shout out to katrina and my girlfriend who she's the one who actually came up with the design behind this she's the one who looked up all the requirements that the chickens need and i just helped basically put it all together of course i did make a lot of contributions in terms of how to use reclaimed wood and put this actual idea but we did build it together and she's the one who came up with all the designs so big shout out to her and thanks before we get into some of the details of the design considerations let's talk about some of the basic things that needed to exist in this chicken coop so what you're looking at is the front and this is a south facing wall and what you're seeing is up here these are some reclaimed boards that what we've done is we've covered them in a spar urethane designed for outdoor use and below that are cabinet doors so we got these cabinet doors from a garage sale they're just basic kitchen cabinet doors that we've repainted and repurposed for the purpose of actually our clean out point so what i say clean out inside here right here is the floor point of the interior of the coop and this is actually a pallet that the whole structure is sitting on so this is the floor line and inside the floor line up to maybe about the top of this board is entirely filled with litter in this case the litter is a triple screen wood shaving so that's sitting in this bottom surface and that's where the chickens are going to poop all night while they're sleeping and anytime they're in there and so this is actually a deep litter method coupe and what that means is that you fill in a initial layer of litter and after that you keep continuously adding layer and after about six months you clean everything out and you compost that and put in fresh litter the really nice thing about that is that for those six months all you're really doing is occasionally getting something like a fork or a rake and mixing it up in there maybe once a week and then when things are starting to get a little stinky or it looks like they're getting very soiled you just throw in some more wood shavings so it's really convenient because it's really easy to manage so as we get ready to take a look inside i'm going to actually talk about some of the security features and when i say security that's probably the most important thing you should think about when you're building a coop it really depends on where you live and what sort of predators around you in our case we're in a we are in a urban environment so our main predators are things like raccoons possums skunks and coyotes so in san diego we actually do have a lot of coyotes that live even in the urban areas they're off in the canyons and we've seen some in our street before so that's definitely a consideration when we built this but the biggest one in our case is raccoons they are very smart very strong and very determined in getting their meals so i'm gonna be mentioning some security features as we go first thing you'll see is this crazy barricade it's like a castle wall barricade protectant and the idea is that even if these doors were to try to open they're not going to go anywhere because they're going to hit this barricade so if you're a raccoon and you are smart you might be able to open this carabiner here and actually another tip is that carabiners are considered to be one of the more secure things to use but the raccoon's going to first have to get this carabiner off then it's going to have to open this latch right here open the doors but before it does that it actually has to move this entire two by four so that's the purpose of this two by four is that it's a kind of last-ditch security effort the really nice thing about it is that it's really easy to just kind of slide off you don't even have to take it off all the way you could just go halfway like in this case and these are called barricade bar holders i believe so that's what you want to look for if you want to use something like this it's especially nice since we repurposed everything we wanted to have the ability to not worry about the security of the repurposed wood and that barricade bar really provides us a lot of peace of mind so as i open this door i'll point out a couple things first i have these little magnetic locks here that's to kind of make sure that this door doesn't just pop open very easily it's a little extra piece of protection it's mostly for ease honestly and the other thing i'll point out is that there's a piece of wood right here and the purpose of that is that when this is closed there's quite a significant gap because everything here is repurposed wood repurposed doors so nothing really fits perfectly and so by putting this little piece of wood here behind the door it acts as a draft stopper so chickens really are very cold hardy in the sense that they can handle very cold temperatures but they don't like giraffes so you want to make sure that while insulation isn't the biggest deal draftiness is so you want to try to limit that as much as you can so i'll go ahead and pop open this door and what you'll see is all the litter i was mentioning earlier so over time it does compact and sort of smush down and you can see there's quite a lot of poop and interesting thing about chickens is that they seem to choose something and stick to it so they all like this particular roost and everything back there almost never gets used so this entire coop was built for the purpose of giving them plenty of space and they're only literally using this part right here almost nothing at all happens back there so what they'll do is they'll sit here and all night they'll poop and one of the craziest things is that chickens poop a lot a lot more than i ever thought they did and it's kind of incredible so that's kind of what the deep litter looks like i'll say that in here some of the other considerations we made is that we have this floor which is a pallet with plywood sheets on top the plywood and all the side walls that you see in here are coated in a spar urethane that's to make it waterproof it's to make sure that the wood can handle the excess moisture from all the bedding from all the pooping anything like that so if you do have unpainted wood or you're using straight wood i would highly recommend doing a spar urethane coating on everything you have for everything else that you see it's just exterior paint but anything that's raw wood does have the spar urethane coating on it another critical security feature for your chicken coop is a predator curtain and the way this works is that you get pvc coated welded wire fence you want pvc coated because it's on the ground so the coating is going to protect it from rusting faster and what this is is it's two feet of welded wire fencing on the ground so the reason why it's here is that there's a lot of predators things like raccoons or skunks will actually dig to get underneath into your coop and actually coyotes as well i should say and this stops them from digging so if they were to come here and they would try to dig they're going to hit this and they're not going to be able to get any progress and then they're going to want to step back and try to do it from a further point but they're going to have to go two feet back and dig a two foot tunnel underground to get into your chicken coop so that's going to stop anything except maybe the most determined animal on earth from getting in there it's very easy to put together so i highly recommend it maybe it'll add something like a 30 40 custer coupe depending on where you can get this welded wire and for how much but the way it functions is that we have this piece of wood that wraps all the way around the structure and that's only there to secure this hardware cloth to it and to secure the predator apron to it so every other square or every three squares i believe is a staple shot around the welded wire fencing into the wood and on the outside on the ground level is a landscape staple maybe every foot or so so that's to stop this whole thing from being lifted and for something to just go right underneath i would say that this is essentially a mandatory thing depending on where you are of course but it's such a nice peace of mind and it really was one of the easiest things to install for this whole build now we've seen a lot of the main features on the front of the coop here so let's go ahead and pop inside first i'll make a little note just because it bothers me too is that this post should be going this way to support the gate technically that's the right way to do it but in this case this isn't actually really supporting any weight honestly this is all just one by ones so i'm not really worried about it so i'll come in and there's a spring now so that this gate closes automatically behind me and it's not the you know it's not a masterwork it's u-posts in the ground with two by fours attached to it and that's what's actually holding this whole gate it doesn't have to do much it only has to hold chickens back so we'll come in here now and we'll take a look at the nesting box and some of the other security features over here so as we're looking at this side of the coop there's a couple main features the biggest of course being the nesting box this nesting box was repurposed from a like a little kit chicken coop that we found on craigslist somebody was trying to get rid of we were going to use that originally but we determined that honestly the build quality and the use case was entirely garbage it was way too small way too flimsy and we kind of just jumped it but we did save the nesting box to save us some time so we didn't have to rebuild it ourselves the other thing that i'll point out is that i have a little cooling fan here this is really this is connected to a solar panel right now it's not connected because it's not hot it provides a little extra airflow in the hotter months this whole structure is designed so that the high point has the most ventilation and here you can see hardware cloth and that hardware cloth actually wraps around here too because you want to make sure that nothing like a mouse or a rat can actually get into your coop itself so that's another reason why the hardware cloth is very important so this is going to provide ventilation it's the highest point so the heat naturally rises it only has one way to go and that's out again everything that can open has a hasp and latch and also has a carabiner carabiners are tricky for things like raccoons to open which is why we're using them we would have to open this and then also manage to get it off the hook and then we would also have to know to open this hasp up so that's the kind of double security feature there but let's bring the camera in a little closer and i'll show you exactly what it looks like here and actually looks like we have a little egg too one thing i really want to add is a way to secure this up here so i don't have to manually hold it so when you open this up you'll see that there are two separate nesting sites it's important to have at least two most people have said and we also found to be true that the chickens will actually end up probably only using one so this is the one that they end up using the most and this is an egg from our chicken sweet potato so that's the rhode island red she's the most consistent layer but she is sort of the least friendly of the bunch i would say but i'll leave this here now i don't want to put it in my pocket forget about it but you always want to have the two options because otherwise they will fight over it but if there's only one that they like they will use it on occasion though the chickens have used this nesting box as well so basically long story short have a minimum of two but don't be surprised if they only use one now we're at the entrance of the run itself um so a couple things i'll note really quick is that that predator current that we talked about is on this side as well it's around every single part of this coupe you'll see a couple different things here you'll see that there's this little block of wood here and that's to stop the door from kind of pulling open here so this is an extra security feature very high tech a piece of wood with a screw in it you just move it out of the way when you want to open the door the other thing is that we have a carabiner and you go ahead and open that carabiner you lift this and you swing it back down on the other side and you can leave your carabiner there so that's the secondary security feature and then i personally got paranoid that something can come down here and sort of wiggle this door open because it is a door that's made out of just one by twos it's not the strongest thing in the world so i put the cinder block here as the third and final security feature that way even if something were to pull on this it would hit the cinder block so the security might seem a little over the top but for us it's important we never want anything at all to happen to these lovely ladies so security is our number one concern when it comes to this coupe construction just keep that in mind and actually i think they're all pecking at the door because they want to get out so we could go ahead and swing this open yeah they all came running out so while they're out here pecking around is the perfect opportunity for me to show you inside here so i'm gonna go handheld in here because it gets a little tight so let's go ahead and pop in i'm going to point out a couple different things as we go first of all the easiest way to do this kind of enclosed structure is to have your posts and your wood beams and then you want to do the hardware cloth from the inside that way you could do the overlaps on a piece of wood like this so this is one piece of hardware cloth that comes up from the ground to here and then a second piece starts and that goes up to the roof so if you're trying to do it any other way it'd be really hard to secure it but with the wood you just shoot a bunch of staples right into the hardware cloth this is secure nothing's going to be able to rip this out over here we have our food bucket i could try to find the link to what this is it's been working out okay it's basically a kit that is designed so that you get a five gallon bucket and you cut out a hole and you pop this guy in it's this elbow of pvc so what happens is the food will settle in here the chickens will poke their head in and peck the food out and to refill all you have to do is get in your bucket and dump some new food in so that's been working all right i will say that we lifted it off the ground so it's not too low but i think well i know what's gonna happen next is that we're gonna actually just go ahead and hang this on a piece of string and the nice thing about that is that we have these two by fours on the roof so we'll just hang it from that and the reason why is i'll tell you a couple different stories is that the other day we actually found a rat in here so that's really bad that made us feel really bad because a rat in there means that it's pooped in there we have to throw out all that food and a rat getting stuck in your chicken coop can be quite bad because while the chickens are in their coop and sort of sitting on their wrist they can get nibbled at by the rats overnight so that's really quite a bad thing that we discovered and the two things we're going to do to solve that is we're going to lift the bucket off the ground to make it harder but also what you'll see is that to save money we decided to use welded wire fencing on top and that's to just make sure that nothing can get in here but what can get through here are rats and that's something we didn't think would be a problem obviously that was a little naive you try to save a couple bucks to skip it and now your life is a lot harder because you have to figure out how to get hardware cloth everywhere on this coop so that's what i've been working on lately is just throwing on a second layer of hardware cloth across the whole surface i'm doing it with bits and bobs of hardware cloth that we have laying around to try to still save some money just because we have a lot of excess little pieces that are cut so you'll see that they're stitched together by wire here but basically if you want to make sure that your coop is entirely safe just do hardware cloth everywhere and then you never have to worry about it will cost you a little bit more up front but it's really quite worth it now when it comes to watering we tried a couple different things at first like one of those pvc kits that have like a little cup that fills with water and they peck it to get more water into the cup that didn't seem to work very well because it got dirty and so what we did is we switched to this kind of nipple system and what happens is as the chickens poke this water comes out and then they drink it up so and again it's really nice because it uses a five gallon bucket you just need to fill this up every couple weeks or even a month and there's a three different nipples on here that they could access water from again we lifted it off the ground and and we just didn't want it hanging somewhere because there's not that much real estate so we have it under their little balcony for coming in and out of the coop so earlier i showed you guys this from the other side but basically this is the area that's entirely shaded at all times they like to get under there and dig and just kind of hang out in the shade and then when it comes to getting in and out of the coop itself they come out from here onto this little chicken balcony and then they walk down this ramp so if you have a ramp that's kind of steep and this is sort of steep not you know the steepest thing in the world but the steeper you get the more often you want to have these little steps for them to climb on and we lifted it up off on some cinder blocks so it's not just like a totally steep drop and so they'll just hop onto that cinder block and then just walk up the ramp and tuck themselves in at night one thing that we want to do is get a automatic coupe door for this instead of this so we have the option of closing them in there when we think it's beneficial another thing we've discussed is getting a automatic door to this area so they could go in and out of this run but before we could do that we have to talk a little bit about securing that area we have a couple rocks here so they could jump around on and so that they can't dig out the edges and the other things that we have in here are i believe this one's grit so they need to eat a little bit of grit to help them break down food and this one is oyster shells which gives them calcium and this is a little chicken swing every once in a while they'll actually jump up here and swing around for fun you'll notice that there's a lot of little greenery around um whenever we have extra greens or if i'm pruning things i'll just grab them and throw them in here and they'll eat it and it'll break down and disappear into the dirt in no time so when we're talking about different chickens one of the nice things about choosing your own varieties is that some varieties are much friendlier than others the orpington family seems to be one of the friendliest which is what chirp is here she's a buff orpington the other breeds that we have are a rhode island red a easter egger and a wine dot but every orpington is apparently much friendlier than most of the other chickens and the buff orpingtons in particular are friendly and still lay a decent amount of eggs so that's kind of chirp is definitely the star of the show here she's the friendliest and she demands cuddles many many times she'll often times she'll bite or peck us so that we pick her up like you can see this right now but buff arpington great chicken for somebody who has kids and they want to hang out with their chickens and maybe have a little snuggle buddy so that's what i'll say about breeds and let's talk a little bit about some of the final features in this chicken run if you do decide to build your own chicken coop and run there are a couple considerations like for instance you want the ramp to be at a specific angle you want the roost and the nesting box height differential to exist because otherwise they won't use the roost or the nesting box for its intended purpose so we found the website that we use to kind of get that information i'll go ahead and throw that in the description if you guys want to check that out i will say that building the coupe was worth it in the end because we got exactly what we wanted and it was kind of a fun project overall um but we did use reclaimed wood for a lot of it which meant that nothing was straight nothing was true it was impossible to get anything square and plumb let's just say that but it still works and that's great because we were able to divert a lot of wood from the landfill and we were also able to save us a ton of money which to be honest was our main consideration luckily we knew somebody who had to redo their deck and their deck had a lot of two by fours involved so we were able to scrap all that they were all kind of bowed from having a lot of weight on them and they had a lot of rusty nails but overall definitely worth it the biggest expense i would say is the hardware cloth it could get quite pricey but like i said if you want peace of mind you want the security in your coop 100 worth it don't even think about it you're going to put it up once and it should last you for i don't know how long but it should last you for quite a while um one other little consideration is that when you're doing this kind of structure with the hardware cloth you don't want to use a handheld staple first of all you'll cramp your hand in no time second it's not strong enough to get fully into a lot of the wooden beams and the other thing is that the staples are quite short so either go to home depot or hardware store and rent a guest or sorry compressor powered staple gun or if you know somebody who has one borrow it from a friend if you don't have the time or you don't want to develop the skills to kind of build something like this just buy a coupe but try to make sure that it has some of those important features that i'm going to link in that website included one thing to consider is that the coupe if you build a fully enclosed run like this is something that they don't spend that much time in so you could go ahead and just buy the coop and then build an enclosed run yourself this was probably the easiest part it's just a bunch of stapling and basically building a little box one thing you'll notice is that chickens seem to really like digging around boundaries so here that's why we have all these pavers up against the fence line is that so that they can actually dig right there but not dig at the fence and actually create a hole underneath it so that's why we have all these pavers up along the fence here just a few closing thoughts here as i finish up this tour of the chicken coop and run is that we have this huge outdoor run compared to the enclosed run that i showed you guys over there that's about maybe six by eight feet in total space something around there actually might be closer to eight by eight but anyway this area is way larger this is something like 50 by 20 feet i don't even know but significantly larger space the chickens love being out here in the sun they love digging up bugs and we have a nice little orchard that's gone into the ground and if you want to see the full video explanation and details behind this chicken orchard that's over on the epic gardening channel but a couple things i'll say that i didn't mention that video are that we have a passion fruit here that's going to grow and take over this whole fence line passion food is a great plant to have with chickens because the chickens love and will eat the leaves from the passion fruit and if you've grown passion fruit before you know that that's basically a weed and nothing's going to stop it from growing so we'll have plenty of passion for leaves for the chickens and plenty of passion fruit for us to eat the other thing is that i haven't started growing any cover crop in here for the chickens to eat but that's going to be mixed in one of the nice things we really like about having chickens is that they're really quite entertaining so we have this area over here set aside for seating that we could come out here let the chickens out and kind of sit down and relax and the chickens will oftentimes jump up on our laps just like that especially trip and hang out with us so it's really nice it's really relaxing having chickens honestly they're really funny and entertaining to watch and having an area where you could set them up and give them everything they need is really quite rewarding so with that being said final plans are that we're going to have tree stakes around this whole fence line and bird netting above it so that we can make sure that our chickens are protected from hawks and also a couple people commented saying that chickens will can and will jump over our fences here but that's never happened they've gone they've tried once or twice when they've seen us immediately on the other side and wanted to jump to us but they can't seem to clear it all the breeds that we have are quite large so while the yes they can fly and they can jump some distance this is quite a leap for them to make they don't really have any reason to all their food water and free range areas here there's nothing kind of compelling them to escape but if they do try that our tree sticks with bird netting coming around the top of this we'll stop that anyway so maybe that'll come up in a future video but i think that's all we need to cover today so thanks for watching if you enjoyed that feel free to give me a thumbs up and if you aren't subscribed please do because this chicken orchard is just getting started [Music] you

Channel: Jacques in the Garden

Views: 78,111

Keywords: jacques in the garden, epic gardening, chickens, chicken, chicken coop, coop, diy, reclaimed wood, carpentry, egg, nesting box, enclosed run, chicken run, chicken orchard, chicken breeds, design and build, backyard chickens, urban gardening, urban chickens

Id: hAx1WaSQ4qE

Length: 25min 30sec (1530 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021