A new coop for the flock

Having a flock in the backyard has certainly been a learning experience for us! The coop that we built last year has been wonderful; it is light weight, easy to move around the yard and it keeps the Ladies pretty well contained..... for the most part......Fern has figured out how to get out coop if the house is not lined up just right and the dogs have figured out how to get in if the sides are sitting cattywhumpus. (it is not the birds they are after, it is the alluring chicken scratch that inspires them to break in) The birds flying the coop would not be such a big deal either except for the fact that they jump the fence to the neighbor's yard and while I can mostly appease the neighbors with eggs on occasion, I rather not have birds running around the neighborhood all willy nilly. Then the "Arctic Blast" hit Vancouver in December with more than a foot of snow and it became obvious that the coop was not designed for snow loads either!

So with the rough winter behind us and hens that are flying the coop in the afternoons, I decided it was time to re-vamp the ladies living arrangements.

It all began with a vision of PVC.... With a few joints, some cuts and a bit of glue I could easily build a lightweight, sturdy and secure chicken coop, right!? A pretty straight forward weekend project. No problem!

Gee, if it were only that easy!! The more I thought about it (and had Russ's guidance) the more I realised what I needed for a roof, supports and joints, I came to the realization I had a full blown engineering, design and construction project on my hands. So I hunkered down to get it done!

The first step was to figure out what parts I'd need so I had to draw it all out. Fortunately, Russ had all the tools I needed to make it to scale. There was much sketching, erasing, figuring, re sketching, crossing out and revising in the initial phases. This quickly became more than a weekend project! As I quickly realised, the complicated part of PVC comes when you want to make something 3 dimensional. Plumbing wasn't exactly designed to go 3 or 4 different ways so finding the parts for a corner of a cube isn't always easy. Fortunately, the Internet will find you just about anything you want, and I did find a supplier in Oregon that carried exactly the joints I needed for the roof and corners.

The next step was to lay the whole mess out and figure out what lengths to cut the PVC.

So far it sounds pretty easy and straight forward, but I assure you, this was quite a brain teaser to figure out how to make all the corners work, how much PVC to get, and still have an angled roof with braces to hold up to wind, snow and whatever other weather we might get in the next few years. And on top of all that to make sure all the joints are square, you really have to think hard in what order to assemble the pieces to have it all come out square.

So I measured, calculated, measured, scribbled, cut, measured and repeat a hundred times over until I had a bucket of pieces and a list of measurements ready to assemble. It was sort of like a huge Lego's project. I made a diagram and labeled everything as I cut and measured so I ended up with a bunch of different lengths of PVC with letters on each end... A-L with letter on each joint telling me where to fit everything together. I must say, it was pretty clever the way I kept myself organized.

Then it was time to start putting the frame together....

Then came the next task of calculating how to get it to the backyard before the final gluing and chicken wire installation. So more configuring and calculating, and careful maneuvering through the canopy (storage area) and I got it all in the back yard in 3 or 4 pieces. Phoenix was pretty happy to have me move the project to the backyard, as she wanted to oversee the progress too. She approved of the design.

After a few more days of attaching chicken wire and then configuring the roof tarp, the coop is complete.

It took the ladies a bit of coaxing to get in the new coop, but they seem to have settled into their new abode rather well. It is much roomier than their old pad and it even has an out door roosting option. (they have a perch inside their hen house, however this new pen has an outdoor roost as well. The roof provides ample protection form the rain and sun while the sides can be pulled up when the days get drier and warmer to allow more for more air flow. It is quite the elaborate chicken hut, that is for sure!