Finding The Best Chicken Coop Plans
November 28, 2009 by Lifestyle Editor
Filed under Home Improvement
There are many offers of chicken coop plans online, but which of these will result in a good-quality working chicken house? If you are already familiar with keeping hens, are good at detailed planning, making your own blueprints from basic plans or sketches, generating a comprehensive materials list before starting to assemble your chicken coop, as well as being an experienced woodworker, then you will probably get by with any general chicken coop plans you come across.
On the other hand, you might just be wasting your time and money if you get indifferent guidance, and you could end up building a hen house that proved to be a very unhappy and unsafe environment for your poultry. Careful, accurate planning and proper blueprints are essential to making a good chicken coop.
Good planning for making a working chicken coop will include as a minimum:
- Selecting a suitable site for the chicken coop in your yard or garden
- Calculating the right size of chicken house for the number of hens
- Ensuring there is adequate ventilation and lighting in the coop
- Choosing the nesting box and feeder arrangements
- Designing adequate protection from predators
- Considering any services to the chicken coop such as electricity and water supplies
Most people will need expert advice and guidance to do this planning thoroughly, and will depend on good blueprints rather than sketchy plans and vague layout drawings to build a proper hen house. Without such blueprints there is a good chance you will not produce a satisfactory hen house, it might not be strong enough and it might give ready access for predators.
If you adopt a trial-and-error approach you will certainly cost yourself in wasted materials and effort, your enthusiasm will take plenty of knocks and – perhaps most importantly – you will not get the enjoyment and satisfaction you should be getting. In addition, unhappy or unhealthy hens are poor layers, so you will be denied those lovely free-range eggs you had so eagerly anticipated.
A full list of materials for the assembly must be prepared before starting to make the coop. This is essential, otherwise you will come up against inevitable problems during the build when you discover you have missed some bracket or fastener and your local hardware shop has already closed! Making a comprehensive materials list is quite difficult to do properly, and we really recommend that you let a chicken coop expert do it for you.
It is so easy to make mistakes without this expert input. Often these will not become apparent until you have completed the hen house, and by then it could be too late to rectify any problems. Good chicken coop plans are certainly worth the small investment, and usually these come with the step-by-step instructions provided in top-quality chicken coop planning kits. We have discovered that good blueprints and clear instructions actually save money and time in the long run.
We have located and strongly recommend a very experienced chicken expert, Mary Nelson. She can supply the best chicken coop plans, in our opinion, including the all-important step-by-step instructions, lists of materials and professional advice for you to plan and make a hen house that will be exactly the way you wanted it. She will help you avoid all those common errors made by beginners, and also show you how to make a happy, safe and healthy home for your birds. Mary Nelson is the best source of good hen house designs for making a wonderful chicken coop.
We hope you really enjoy making your chicken coop, and wish you lots of luck!
Written by Lifestyle Review Editor - Visit Website

