Chicken coop with recycled windows

Every morning we pull the rope to let them forage and every evening when they go to roost we lower it to keep them safe inside. Honestly, I thought it was a brilliant idea. You may be wondering what else did I use those pallets for? I actually did a plethora of things, because like I said, it is an endless supply. The first thing I did was make a fenced in run.

I did not take the pallets apart board by board. That seemed silly to me since I wanted them well protected. If stood on its side a wood pallet is like a double wooden fence.

They also slide together nicely so they can be screwed together, either side by side or stacked two tall. Pretty perfect if you ask me. My chickens then had a run as big as my house is long! Now I would like to share with you the items I had to purchase for building the entire enclosure for my backyard chickens.

Pretty amazing that for less than a dollar a safe haven can be created, right? Of course this is only an example of what I did. This can be done with all sorts of materials to fit whatever needs you may have.

Since the initial enclosure, I have built an entire guinea Coop with nothing but wood pallets from top to bottom. It cost under five dollars for the hardware. I have also made a quail aviary out of the black safety net used for trampolines that someone was throwing away!

Use your imagination. Everything you see can probably be recycled, refurbished and reused in your own backyard! Your chickens are going to enjoy living in the best chicken coop made just for them. Many thanks to Wendy Spencer for this guest post. The book is also available through Amazon. If you use wooden pallets, make sure to change them out about every year. I bought my 5 acres and the previous owners had used pallets. I found three sets of pallets that had just been left to rot, and that is the problem: they rot FAST!!!

Especially if left in the weather. Nails that can and will be picked up by feeding animals like cows and horses, and be stepped on by all types of animals!

Take it from someone who has dealt with the results of pallet building in livestock areas. I had to rent a huge magnet like a lawn mower to get all the nails from the ground…it caught over two 5 gallon buckets full.

I know that pallets are inexpensive and easy to use, and if you are like most farmers and livestock owners, you are trying to make do with the least expensive ways to do things. Their feet are sensitive and can get frostbite easily if they sleep while stepping in feces. We had made a raised mesh floor in their last coop for this reason, which allowed for the droppings to fall through the plastic mesh down to sawdust bedding, which we would periodically refresh.

We removed a piece of our mesh flooring from the old coop and modified the dimensions of our mobile coop to fit this flooring. The mesh floor allows for us to use the duck and chicken droppings as a direct fertilizer below the coop wherever we move it, and saves us the hassle of stooping into the short coop door to clean it out.

We also built the coop on a skid frame in order to be able to move it with the tractor around our fields. All of the lumber in the framing and shingles was from the shipping crates. The plywood pieces for the sides were laying around the farm, full of rusty nails. We removed the nails from the plywood and reused as many of the nails from the shipping crates as possible.

Putting their creative heads together, the guys slid a round pole horizontally under the building and rolled it slowly across the long poles onto the trailer. It was a slow process and took almost four hours to move the building from its foundation to the trailer. After strapping the building down tightly, we had an eight-mile drive to the new location. It was slow going, but our new coop made it safely and was ready to be lowered onto its new foundation using chains and the good old John Deere.

The new 2 x 4 lumber foundation was built with a solid wood floor on 4 x 4 skids with large eye hooks on the ends so that the building could easily be pulled with a tractor to whatever location we desired.

The coop was secured to the new foundation using 20 lag bolts. Then the fun work began. With paint scrapers in hand, we painstakingly scraped off 30 years of dried paint and old wood splinters; removed old rotted window panes and pulled lots of rusty nails. We went back to the farmstead and found an old wooden door on another of the buildings that we modified to fit our coop.

We pulled down cobwebs and scoured the inside so that it was clean and sterile, and built new nesting boxes and roosting ladders. The old wood on the outside was so thirsty, it soaked up three layers of paint as we painted the building and trim to match our barn. We purchased fence panels that are used to make a dog run and wrapped the chicken yard around the side and back of the building to ensure that regardless of sun location, our flock had plenty of shade. We moved our flock into their new home on a rainy Saturday afternoon.

It was wonderful to watch them inspect their new quarters. They had plenty of space to walk around, scratch in fresh shavings and perch on their roosts, even with the stormy weather outside. Our recycled chicken coop has become a beautiful addition to our property and we feel good knowing that we were able to take something old and make it new again. Jayne Lantz, Indiana — This is our chicken coop made from items friends and neighbors had lying around.

We have 30 chickens at the present time living in the house. The chicken coop is built with 75 percent recycled materials, galvanized roofing, 2 x 4s, and stone. The main expenses were concrete, the outside cage, and wire. We will be adding chicken wire along the sides of the cage for chicken predator protection and we have chicken wire along the top of the pen also.

We would have liked to have free range chickens but too many predators including fox, coyote, dogs, and muskrat prevent that. Many hours have been put into building this coop but my husband enjoyed doing it and having our friends and neighbors admire it as it was being built.

We did plenty of research into building sturdy, attractive chicken runs and coops and are happy with what we finally ended up with! They sleep in, come and go as they please and each hen lays nearly one egg a day for us.

We started our chicken journey in April with four hens. They were the cutest little things. What a precious little thing. After all, they were so tiny and seemed to be very content to cuddle for warmth.