What You Can Do: Missy's Homestead: Building a Coop

COOP!!!

It has finally happened!!! I have a chicken coop! Made by my hands (but really made by my friend's hands, I was the assistant, driller, materials collector and designer).

To my delight pretty much all the materials were recycled or free and it is absolutely the cutest chicken coop on the block!

Last year on my trip through Europe, with my husband, we met the most delightful Australian couple that were on an 18 month trip around the world. They were awesome and we clicked right away. They said they would be in California sometime the next year and we told them we would have to meet up.

Well almost exactly a year later here they were and of course we accepted them to the homestead with open arms.

Pallets

At some point in the hangout process I mentioned to them my desire to build my own chicken coop with recycled materials. Both Karli and Jarred said they would love to do that project together with me so we begun the design process. I had a few pallets that I had gotten from Greg's work and we also had access to a bunch of old fence boards from my brother in law's fence that we replaced several months back. We did have to go to home depo for a few 2 x 4's for the frame and of course more screws but that was about it. We used the pulled apart pallets as part of the frame too and enclosed the entire coop with some of the pallet tops and the fence boards. For the roof we decided to do it in tin so we went to the salvage yard and looked through their inventory. We found some okay sheets and took those back home. We were also able to buy a bunch of hinges and locks for the coop for super cheap.

Overall the building process for the coop took about 3 days to complete. The coop is not perfect but to me it is. I don't care if it is not totally straight or level or if it has some cracks in the boards etc. It is my coop and I got to help build it with 2 of my favorite people. This experience was more than I had ever imagined. Not only is the coop adorable but my chickens love it.

(more on the chicken raising, buying etc. in the next blog post)

Jarred is amazing

Because we were able to build the coop ourselves and use found materials etc., I only spent about $40.00 on the misc. coop building items, which in the end saved me several hundred dollars and I was able to use materials that were suppose to go the dump.