Chicken Housing Design

When it comes to chicken housing one has many design and style decisions to make and aside from some very basic needs -- todays chicken can thrive almost anywhere -- your chicken house can be as whimsical or as functional as you like.

I've looked at hundreds of chicken housing designs on the intarweb and in books but the single greatest source of ideas while designing my own chicken housing has been Chicken Coops: 45 Building Plans for Housing Your Flock. Aimed at the urban chicken owner the book reaches far beyond this arena to bring working designs from the down right temporary to housing for 700 broiler chickens on working farms. I find that this is a great approach because it reinforces the basic requirements of food, water, protection and shade and illustrates the different ways other owners have implemented them.

Plans in the book are by no means complete but each design includes several sketches with measurements, a bit of background on the builders' requirements and sketches of interesting design details. The final section of the book includes color pictures of most of the designs featured in the book. I found the measurements to be helpful to give an idea of scale, I think the single most voiced question by a new chicken owner is, "How big [or how small] does my chicken coop need to be?" A valid and important question. It was my first question and while this book doesn't explore the more technical details* it gives an excellent idea of the possibilities.

Be sure to spend plenty of time designing your structure, I found that my design changed through mock-up and implementation (and I've even found a couple of design changes I'd like to make if I only had a time machine).

*[For a concise discussion of technical space requirements you should check out Building Chicken Coops: Storey Country Wisdom Bulletin A-224]