My Chicken House

My dear husband built me a chicken house ten years ago. It's a wood-frame building set on a concrete curb-like footer.

We got some perfectly good surplus windows for little-a-nothing, and a couple of doors the same way.

We designed sort of a vestibule/storage area just inside the exterior door, where we keep the feed and whatnot. The second, inner door lets you into the Inner Sanctum where the chickens live. We did purchase a set of nesting boxes with hinged roosts with little sliding doors on the backs so we can gather eggs without having to go into the chicken house, and he built "low" (about a foot off the floor) and "high" (about waist high) roosts out of 2x2's, along three sides of the inside of the chicken house.

It has a wood floor, covered with a linoleum-type flooring (probably vinyl or whatever they're making that stuff out of these days), which we got as a remnant. When we have chickens, we layer the floor with four to six inches of wood chips for chicken litter. We have traditionally purchased said wood chips from a local farm supply outfit. Now that Steve is doing more carpentry, he makes plenty of sawdust but I'd want to sift the fine dusty stuff out of it if we were going to try to put any of that on the hen house floor. Nobody, including my chickens, needs to be inhaling wood dust.

There is a little slider door that you can open and close with a rope on a pulley, that opens out into a fenced, covered yard area so the chickens can go outside, see the sunshine and feel the wind, and still be in a protected environment. It's like a porch except that it's bare ground out there. We call it the chicken yard.

The fence around the chicken yard has a gate-like door that we can open to let the chickens out to free-range for the day, if we wish. Unfortunate experience has taught us to let them out when we are going to be around to monitor things. We used to let them out in the morning before we went to work in the city, but there's a lot can happen when you're gone eleven, twelve hours a day. We changed to leaving them penned up if we're going to be gone and only letting them out when we're there.

On the other side of the chicken house from the little yard door, is another little door that we use for clean out. This one is just a little door on hinges that locks with a bolt-latch. We like to do a thorough clean out about twice a year - all the old, used litter goes out, sweep the floor, maybe scrub any crusty places with a stiff bristle broom. That flooring could also be mopped and disinfected if it seemed necessary. We would then put the chicken litter in the compost heap.

I posted a current pic. It looks a bit overgrown right now, but we've been away these seven years and it's surrounded with chest-high weeds and poison ivy. Someone has had a dog or dogs in there, so there is a little chew damage, some dig-out places, and a couple of the roosts are broken, but it all appears to be relatively easy to repair. We just have to get the human house habitable before we can start on the chicken house.

I'll post again when there's some progress to show.