Backyard Chicken Coop Plans with Kennel/Run, Salbox/Lean-to 4 ft x 10 ft Two-in-One Plans, Design 60410SL

This chicken coop worked out great for us! It comfortable houses our 5 chickens, who unfortunately are not able to free-range. If you can free-ranger your chickens, it can easily hold more. Sometimes all 5 of my chickens roost on the top roost all snuggled up together, leaving the other 2 roosting bars free. So, you could definitely house more chickens. We modified the plan slightly b/c we found tongue-and-groover cedar siding that was pre-stained and beautiful, but made the dimensions just a little different. One thing I would do differently if we were to do it again would be to raise the chicken door into the run a bit to allow for using the deep litter method. As it is now, we can't go very deep at all b/c all the bedding material falls out the door. Not a flaw in the design, just something you need to factor in if you want to do the deep litter method.

instructions suck, there is no complete material list, many dimensions don't add up

Chicken coops are pretty simple but these plans have a lot of difficult angles. It looks cute but it isn't easy. My husband has said that he doesn't want to use these plans and wants to build a different design. Also, it does not look too easy to clean out. I think we will pass on this and build something a little more user friendly.

Building on the weekends, this took us about 2 months to complete. Both my boyfriend and I have fair amounts of building experience and haven't had any problems so far; but for someone with no experience, the plans may be a little hard to understand as most of the "instruction" really is interpretation of the drawings. The materials list and cutting list have a few mistakes: We used 4 sheets of OSB (not 5 as listed) and 5 sheets of plywood (not 3 as listed); paint will be closer to 1 gallon as the untreated lumber sucks it up; we also used 2 1/2 bundles of shingles (list says 1, we could have gotten away with 2 but we shingled the nest box as well); 6-7 feet of rope (not 5). Piece C16: use the birds mouth pattern and your notch will be about 2 1/4 inch in, not 3 1/8 as listed; Step 3 - center truss gets 2 gussets, other gussets (on end trusses) should face in towards middle; E10 = 3 1/2 x 16 1/2 (not 16 1/8), D7 is the ramp panel (not D6); G9 - need 2 vertical window trims (not 12), For the Kennel = a few mistakes on the chicken wire sizes: F1 needs to be 66" long (not 56); F3 = you will need 2 of these, not the 1 listed; F5 = will be closer to 68" high and F6 closer to 60. The best bet is to measure these pieces to fit as you will be finagling the frame to make sure it is square and this will change the lengths a little. Also, we wound up needing closer to 60 feet of hardware cloth - can use the 24" wide size. For the coop, we also changed the roost to only two cross pieces so that it doesn't take up the whole inside of the coop = we needed some room to put our water inside and the full roost took up too much space. We only have 5 hens so this worked for us. Overall = a good design.

Italic fonts used and prints are very light makes it hard to read the instructions.

We were going to design and build our own chicken coop, but after thinking it over we decided it would be much easier to buy plans to save my husband and I from having to run back and forth buying misc. supplies not knowing what we needed exactly. The plans come with a material list that my hubby took with him to buy everything, and bam done. Well, not exactly bam, it took my husband about a week to build it. The chicken wire was the biggest pain, I would recommend the sturdier wire vs. chicken wire.

We decided to modify this coop a little bit so I am able to step inside and clean. We also bought cedar shingles for the siding instead of painting and decided on tin for the roof. This project was a little labor intensive but I love the way it turned out. Super cute!

This was the first time I built anything and this coop took FOREVER to build. I used over 2 gallons of paint. Two bundles of shingles barely covered the two roofs. I like the coop but if I could do it over again I would have chosen a different design. 2x3's split really easily especially if you use deck screws like I did. I used about 7 pounds of screws! I couldn't figure out how to make the roost bar or where I should install it. I used chicken wire but I should of used hardware cloth instead. My 8 week old chicks like to poke their head out of the 2 inch holes. That worries me. Once you shoot the staples in the wood they're pretty much in there for good so be careful. The coop is very dark inside. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. The plans were pretty accurate except you need more of everything. Oh yeah, make sure you cut the trim at the end