Hen house

coop2

coop3

We have decided to get chickens - and, being a tight arse, I am building the hen house or, coop, from old pallets.
Milo and I have had a few furtive drives around the local industrial estate, jumping out of the van and bundling pallets into the back. Milo was little help - but he did keep a look out for me.

Still to do: Roof, front, back, nest areas, perch, chicken run, chickens.

And advice on choosing a breed or anything I haven’t thought of for the coop - please feel free to comment.

Written by exmonkey on April 15th, 2007 with 23 comments.
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gilesbooth
#1. April 15th, 2007, at 8:48 PM.

Have a butcher’s (and I use the word advisedly) at Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Cookbook - good section on keeping chickens. Am very jealous - want to know how you get on with this! How’s the beer, btw?

exmonkey
#2. April 15th, 2007, at 9:41 PM.

The beer is (soon to be was) excellent - really as good as most pints you can get in a pub. I am doing another brew this week.

ditdotdat
#3. April 15th, 2007, at 11:46 PM.

Nice workmanship dude!

Spooky
#4. April 16th, 2007, at 8:11 AM.

Wondered if you had thought about giving some ex battery chickens a home? Several friends of mine have done it and picked the birds up from the battery farm. The manager won’t let you go into the hen house to choose the ones you want (not a pretty sight) but will randomly bring some out. They do need a bit of TLC to start with but very quickly settle into their new lifestyle and produce great eggs!

exmonkey
#5. April 16th, 2007, at 9:36 AM.

Actually the ‘home a battery hen’ debate rages in our house at the moment.

Whilst I think that ex-battery hens deserve a home, I’m not sure that I want to eat eggs that come from a chicken that’s been so saturated with hormones and chemicals.

Debra is pushing to ‘adopt’ a hen, which means paying £20 to allow the charity (The Hen House) to keep a hen for a year.

I think on balance, we probably won’t actually get an ex battery hen, but will actively push the free range eggs argument.

Waitrose, Marks & Spencer and Selfridge’s are the only supermarkets that don’t use battery eggs. Hellmans mayonnaise uses battery eggs, and they say they have no intention of using free range unless consumers ask for it.

People also need to consider the link between cheep chicken (used in fast food outlets and cheap chicken breasts on supermarket shelves)

Debra is also thinking of running a marathon dressed as a chicken. (Debra doesn’t read this blog)

nika
#6. April 16th, 2007, at 1:13 PM.

I do not know which types of chickens you all have available there.. here in the US we have a variety of types, many that are best suited to certain regions. Since we live in the tundra (ok, not REALLY but in the winter, whats a chicken know besides that their comb is getting frostbite) we get the kind suited for the cold weather.

Just as an aside, and not really apropo for you spoiled UK types, chickens tolerate cold much better than than the heat.

We found that Rhode Island Reds were sweet darling chickens that loved to be held by our daughter (who was something like 4 or 5 when we had them).. they ended up following her around too.

Our landed is bounded on three sides by state forest so we have wild animals and specifically we have foxes, coyotes, and HUGE hawks so we had a battle on our hands just to keep the damn birds alive.

We had ENDLESS eggs.. I suggest not getting too many layers because you can have TOO many eggs. You may know enough people to give them away tho.

This is really important to you in the UK.. you need to keep them in a caged area that excludes wild birds and also covered the wild area so that wild bird feces do not drop into the area your chickens are feeding.. this is because of H5N1.

I learned this from that show “The F Word” by whats his name the chef who swears a blue mile as long as Texas.. (Ramsay) he was keeping turkeys in his back yard and his vet told him to construct his pen that way.

I heard people refer to his pen as the Gitmo of turkey-dom ROFL.. it sorta looked like it.

I think I remember you showing photos of a fox family so you will need to build a fox-safe enclosure.. make sure to dig down into the ground something like 18 inched, anchor the chicken wire in rocks or even cement, backfill in with dirt.. bend the bottom edge of the wire that you are burying in the ground out and away from the interior of the enclosure.

“With outside runs, bury the wire along the pen border at least 12″ deep, and toe the fence outward about 6 inches. This stops most predators from digging under the fence. Animals always dig at the base of a fence. By toeing the fence outward and burying it, the predator digs down right into more fencing. Some people run electric fencing around the outside of their pens 4″ off the ground about one foot from the main fence to discourage predators. If your outside runs are not predator-proof, you need to lock up your poultry before dark.”

see this link for more useful info:

http://www.ext.vt.edu/pubs/poultry/factsheets/10.html

Remember to not let little Milo breathe to much of the chicken coop air, its full of mold and other nasty creatures.

exmonkey
#7. April 16th, 2007, at 2:21 PM.

Thanks for the advice Nika.

FYI - H5N1 has only appeared once in our country, so we are generally not quite as worried about it as you may think.

Currently, the government has not said that domestic chickens are at any great risk. Much to the disappointment of the British media, we have so far failed to have a full scale epidemic of bird ‘flu.

Oh - and Ramsey is a cock.

Spooky
#8. April 16th, 2007, at 3:44 PM.

It was only a suggestion that came to mind when you mentioned chicken breeds and not meant to launch into a full on food debate!

Tell Deb to put me down for a fiver!

nika
#9. April 16th, 2007, at 3:48 PM.

LOL re: Ramsay - indeed. I would not worry about H5N1 when its just adults but when there are little kids (like I have) I tend toward the cautious.. I was thinking about getting some dairy goats a couple of years ago but I knew we were going to be having a baby soon so I didnt want to exposed the little ones un-neccessarily to stuff only immature immune systems would notice.

Ally
#10. April 29th, 2007, at 9:48 AM.

Put a droppings board under the perch and you can just scrape it off once a week and not change the litter in the house nearly so often - chickens excrete two thirds of their daily amount at night.

Are you going to eat them as well as have the eggs? If so, go for a heavy breed, like some variety of sussex, or barnvelders or similar. If you just want eggs, consider a lighter breed as they don’t eat quite so much - our Cream Legbars are laying very well, nearly an egg a day, and a beautiful blue-green colour shell. You could also look at specially bred hybrids, which are cheaper to buy and are supposed to eat less again. I like the pure breeds though!

exmonkey
#11. April 29th, 2007, at 1:05 PM.

Thanks for that Ally. We are veggies, so what you’re saying about Legbas makes sense. I hadn’t considered that different breeds may eat more than other.

The problem we have is that once they stop laying, what we do with them - as whilst I’m a committed veggie of 20 years, I also don’t like to think of having to feed a pet or waste a good bird.

exmonkey
#12. April 30th, 2007, at 8:52 PM.

Ally, how do you find you Legbars? Are they flighty or quite relaxed?

Ally
#13. May 1st, 2007, at 5:09 AM.

Pretty relaxed - I have three and they’ve been hand-reared so they get really excited when they see us coming and rush over to join in whatever we’re doing. I do think that lighter breeds tend to be a bit more flighty than heavy ones, generally though; I’ve also got an Exchquer Leghorn and she is quite, quite mad. However, she still comes over to eat out of my hand. I think that if one is only going to keep a few, they tame down pretty quickly, whatever breed they are.

Can you steel yourself to wring their necks when they stop laying? You’ll get a good three or four years out of them though, I should think - as they get older, you get fewer eggs, but the ones you do get are bigger.

Also - can’t quite see from your photo - is your perch round? If so, plane off the top - a perfectly round pole is difficult for them to grip, a rectangular cross-section with smoothed edges is much better for their feet, apparently. I *love* the house - it’s a Pallet Palace! :) .

exmonkey
#14. May 1st, 2007, at 8:25 AM.

the perch is round - it’s a curtain pole from Ikea that never got used. I will attack it with a plane this very night.

Ringing necks… tricky one this. I have to dispatch mortally wounded birds and mice on a weekly basis as my cats are good hunters but have not follow through. I guess I’ll have to deal with the chicken issue in three-four years time.

I’ve always said that I would be more amenable to eating meat if I reared it myself, but in practice I’m note sure what I’d do.

I recognise that in order to get closer to our ultimate dream of living in a small holding, I need to become a little more hardened to the reality of having livestock. I’ve always had a poor opinion of people who keep livestock as pets, because it seems so indulgent and wasteful.

Trevor1005
#15. June 7th, 2007, at 7:28 PM.

Like the look of your hen house. I too build from pallets and am thinking about putting together a further guide for novices to follow. I did one previously for a ‘broody house and run’. I don’t consider it ‘tight arsed’ especially when BBC Breakfast suggest there is a UK wood shortage and 6ft x 6ft fence panels are selling for £80 each now.

Have you got any more pics of the house completed? Would be happy show a few of mine if I knew how to post a pic.

First section of the guide will be ‘How to strip down a pallet’ which is the bit most people give up on.

exmonkey
#16. June 7th, 2007, at 8:08 PM.

Look here

If I’d have been better at stripping the pallets I might have been able to do it with far fewer. Also, I learned that there are a huge range of different types - some are really shit for making anything.

I will upload a few more pics to flickr and post them here when I have uploaded them.

Have you put the broody hen house on the internet? It may be the one I found which inspired me to build mine.

leroy bowen
#17. June 18th, 2007, at 3:22 AM.

What kind of specifics can you give? How many pallets were used, overall size, etc?

exmonkey
#18. June 18th, 2007, at 5:35 AM.

The base is one pallet, with the gaps filled in with smaller bits of pallet wood.

The front height is about the width of a pallet.

The sides and rood were made from the flat bits that make up the bult of the pallet, with cross members being used for the top edges and corners.

In all, I would say that I used around 8 pallets (maybe more - some didn’t break up very well).

If I was to do it again, I would put the side pallet wood on horizontally and overlapping, to make it more watertight and draft proof.

Meg
#19. September 15th, 2007, at 11:24 AM.

*reads* Im 14, but Im eagerly planning to get some hens when I have a house of my own. Ive been doing loads of research.XD I plan to get a green eglu with two hens (come with it) a pure breed of my choice and a battery hen :3.

And as for wringing their necks…x__x aww how cruel. Cant you just give them away or something? killing them after all they have laid and stuff…Im a vegetarian though, so =/.

exmonkey
#20. September 15th, 2007, at 11:55 AM.

we are vegetarian too - so on reflection, we won’t be wringing an necks.

We now have 5 chickens - see here - good luck with yours, fresh eggs are great.

eddie
#21. February 2nd, 2008, at 3:27 PM.

thats a nice hen house, there are loads on the net but i will
copy your one. have a small converted kennel at the moment.

thanx

exmonkey
#22. February 5th, 2008, at 10:59 AM.

I think another cheap(ish) option is to buy a small garden shed and convert it.

Gwales
#23. June 23rd, 2008, at 1:56 AM.

Hi did you finnish pallet coop,

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