CoopNote 1
The coop I built wrong, and the shed that replaced it
The first coop took two weekends and lasted eighteen months. It was never dramatically bad. It simply made every routine job slightly harder than it needed to be, and I only worked out what that costs after the second winter.
- Went up14 May 2023
- Redone2 March 2024
- Reading timeAbout 8 minutes
- GardenSheffield, South Yorkshire
What I built in the first March, and where it wore out
I drew it on squared paper at the kitchen table: a floor of one metre twenty by ninety centimetres, a sloping roof, two nest boxes on the gable end, and a single perch about ninety centimetres long. Four birds were coming and six seemed a comfortable maximum. That perch worked out at roughly fifteen centimetres of rail per bird once there were six of them, and hens do not share a perch politely. The two at the bottom of the order ended up on the nest box lid every night, which meant the nest boxes were filthy by morning and I was scraping eggs before I could use them.
The roof was the second problem. I gave it an overhang of about three centimetres, which looked neat and did nothing at all, so every heavy rain ran straight down the back panel and soaked into the end grain of the frame. By the second autumn the bottom rail on that side had gone soft enough to push a screwdriver into. The floor was the third: I screwed it in permanently instead of making it removable, so cleaning meant kneeling on wet grass and working through a forty-centimetre door with a paint scraper. That took about twenty-five minutes a week in the first summer. By the second summer, when I was working longer hours, it took twenty-five minutes a fortnight, which is not the same job at all.
Ventilation is not the same thing as a draught
The first coop had two sixty-millimetre holes drilled low on the side walls, because I had read that draughts are dangerous and had confused the two ideas completely. From about the middle of October there was condensation on the underside of the roof most mornings, frost on the nail heads by December, and a smell at head height when I opened the door before work that I can only describe as sharp. Two of the birds with larger combs got the blackened tips that come with frostbite that winter, and it was not because Sheffield got cold. It was because they were spending twelve hours a night in a box full of their own damp breath.
What I understand now is that hens deal with cold far better than they deal with wet. A dry bird at minus seven is comfortable and will still be laying. A bird with damp feathers at minus two is in trouble. The air has to leave above the birds, not across them, so the vents belong up at or above ridge height on the sheltered sides, with a reasonable amount of open area rather than a token hole. The rebuild has a gap of about one metre forty running under the ridge, covered with twelve-millimetre galvanised mesh, plus one hatch on the gable that I close only when the wind is coming hard out of the north-east. There has been no condensation on the roof since, and no frostbite in three winters.
The job you dread is the job that quietly stops happening
The single change that altered my week most was a droppings board. It is an offcut of laminate flooring, cut to sit about twenty centimetres below the perches on two battens, and it slides out through the main door like a drawer. Roughly nine tenths of what six hens produce overnight lands on it. Scraping it into a bucket takes four minutes, I do it most mornings while the kettle is on, and because it takes four minutes it actually gets done. The floor underneath now needs a proper strip-out twice a year instead of a grim excavation every month.
The bedding changed with it. I had been using wood shavings on the floor and getting through them fast because they were catching everything. Chopped straw on a board-served floor lasts far longer: a fifteen-kilo bale does about ten weeks for six birds, and the floor stays dry enough that I can turn it with a fork rather than shovelling it. Nest boxes get their own handful of shavings and a shake-out every Sunday, which keeps the eggs clean enough to go straight in the rack.
The shed that replaced it, in October 2022
The second coop is not a coop. It is a second-hand garden shed, one metre eighty by one metre twenty, that came out of a garden three streets away in pieces on a sack barrow over two evenings. It sits on four concrete blocks with about twenty centimetres of clear air underneath, partly to keep the floor off the wet ground and mostly so that nothing can nest in the dark under it. I laid a new floor of eighteen-millimetre board, ran two perches of planed forty-five-millimetre timber with the top edges rounded off, thirty centimetres apart and about a metre twenty each, and cut a pop hole twenty-eight centimetres wide in the sheltered gable.
The important part is that I can stand up in it. Cleaning, checking a bird over, changing a perch, finding the egg that somebody laid in a corner: all of it happens standing, with both hands free, in daylight coming through the window. The run attached to it is three metres twenty by one metre eighty, mesh rather than netting, with half of it roofed in corrugated sheet so there is somewhere dry to scratch in February. It took four weekends in total and most of that was the run.
What I kept, and what I would still change
Three things carried over and I would not build without them again: the droppings board, standing headroom, and perches that lift out of their brackets in ten seconds without tools. The last one matters more than it sounds, because perch ends are exactly where red mite sets up, and a perch you can carry outside into daylight is a perch you will actually inspect.
Two things I would do differently. I would build the run first and the house second, because the run is what determines where the house can sensibly go, and I ended up with a door that opens towards the path instead of away from it. And I would not have painted the inside with a thick coating in the first year. It looked clean and it made every seam a place for mite to sit behind, and stripping it back in the third summer took an afternoon I resented. The first coop is still in the garden, holding the feed bin and a bale of straw, which is the most useful it has ever been.
Counts come off the sheet on the shed door, weights off a kitchen scale, and the dates are the ones the thing actually happened rather than the day I got round to typing it up. This note was last corrected on 2 Mar 2024.