Colin and Faye sent in this inspiring story along with pictures of their beautiful, rustic Garden Coop build and tips for other chicken coop builders in Australia. The rest of this post comes from them. . . .

Our Garden Coop build

We have finished our chicken coop and our six eight-week-old chickens took up residence last Saturday. Thank you for such easy-to-understand plans. For my husband Colin and I, this was our first venture in building anything, and we are very pleased with the outcome.

Giving the chicken coop a rustic Australian look

We used corrugated iron on the left and back walls of the hen house. We had it left over from making some garden beds, and along with the second-hand fence palings on the other two walls, it makes our coop very rustic and Australian looking.

We put the ladder on the side wall and added a door so that our chickens are safely locked away from the many foxes around here at night.

Some tips for fellow Australian coop builders

• With the timber, the 90 x 38 mm boards converted to 90 x 35 mm available here. That may be helpful for others here in Australia to keep in mind. Other measurements in the plans were just right.
• We were able to get the SunTuf polycarbonate roofing here as well.
• At first I could not work out what “hardware cloth” was, but then realized it was wire mesh. The size of the wire mesh is the same here in Australia.
• It was not hard to work out equivalents or substitutes, so thank you for the metric conversion.

A great DIY project, at any age

This has been a terrific project for us, we are in our early sixties. I have learnt so many new skills, and I am so proud of my husband who has Parkinson’s disease, with what he was able to accomplish.

Now we have the pleasure of watching our chickens, which is so relaxing, and look forward to when they start to lay!

—Faye and Colin, Mirboo North, Australia

Thanks to Faye and Colin for sharing their story, tips, and coop pictures! Like what they’ve done? Leave a quick comment to let us know. And feel free to subscribe to Coop Thoughts to get first notice of the latest posts by email. It’s free, ad-free, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, and while I’m admittedly biased in this case — that’s a real-life Garden Coop chicken coop in the background of the cover shot! — garden designer Jessi Bloom’s new book Free-Range Chicken Gardens is as lush and inspiring as the chicken paradise featured on the front.

Enter to win a free copy, plus other chicken stuff. See details below.

The premise of the book is simple: how do you best integrate chickens into a backyard vegetable or permaculture garden. Bloom does a wonderful job of showing you how, drawing not only from her own experience as a garden designer and chicken keeper, but also from the experiences of a diverse group of chicken gardeners she profiles throughout the book.

Topics covered include all the basics of keeping backyard chickens plus how to create a plan for a chicken-friendly garden and what plants to include/avoid in your chickens’ day yard. The illustrations are clear. Kate Baldwin’s photos are gorgeous.

Seriously, if I were a chicken, I’d want to live in this book — or at least in one of the gardens featured in this book — one of which is the handiwork of horticulturalist Alana Meyer. Alana’s sumptuous Washington State garden adorns the book’s cover along with the chicken coop she built using The Garden Coop plans and her own two hands.

CONTEST: Enter to Win a Chicken Garden Kit

Through February 17, 2012, the book’s publisher (Timber Press) is running a contest to promote Free-Range Chicken Gardens. One entrant will win a free copy of the book, chicken feed and supplies — even free plans to build your own Garden Coop or Garden Ark chicken coop. An email address is all it takes to enter. Here’s the contest page. Good luck!

Have you read Jessi’s book? Follow her blog? Leave a quick comment and let us know what you think, what you’ve learned, and what you’ve been inspired to do with your garden and chickens.

Karen sent in these pictures of her Garden Coop and Garden Ark chicken coops in Connecticut. (You may recall this post from a while back that featured a photo of her dog guarding her backyard coop.)

There are a number of reasons you’d want to build both coops: expanding your flock, giving your hens added mobility to graze safely, optional space to house broody hens or deal with personality conflicts (it happens!).

Besides, don’t they just look great together?

Here’s what Karen had to say about her coops:

I have a lot of friends who come over to see our chickens and just love The Garden Coop design. We are planning on adding on the exterior egg boxes this spring. We also built The Garden Ark for our two silkie hens who were having trouble getting along with the chickens in the big coop. I added a little door on the right side so they could have quick access to the yard. They are very happy and the coop is perfect for them. Thanks!

Thanks to Karen for sharing pictures of her chicken coops. Like what she’s built? Leave a comment below. And check out her portrait photography.

Cindy in Rhode Island sent us this picture of her Garden Coop build, all decked out for the holidays. The rest of this post comes directly from her:

The “Hen Hilton”

I purchased your chicken coop plans last summer and completed the coop and pen in early fall with help from a friend who is a retired carpenter. We adapted the plans in several ways to suit my needs and the limitations set by the location I selected in my back yard.

This spot is one of the few level areas on my hillside property. Because it is under an upper deck, it is well protected against the elements, including snow. Facing southeast it gets plenty of sunshine during the day, with some solar gain through the window which warms up the coop toward nightfall. The location also complies with my town’s chicken-coop setback requirements which are fairly restrictive (40-feet from all property lines).

Modifications

Here are some of the modifications we made:

1. Attached hardware cloth on the inside of the back wall because we were backed up against the garage. Replacing the hardware cloth, if ever necessary, will be a lot easier this way.
2. Poured concrete footings in lieu of cinder blocks for additional stability. We sometimes get high winds here on my hillside.
3. Mixed and poured concrete around the buried hardware cloth for extra predator proofing. Several local people have lost flocks to fisher cats, and I am admittedly paranoid about predators.
4. Moved hen door to right wall for more floor space.
5. Installed vinyl flooring on the floor and up the wall one foot inside the hen house. I “scoop poop” every morning — absolutely no big deal to do from the cleanout door.
6. Enlarged the egg door so I can clean the nesting boxes or add shavings/straw from outside the coop.
7. I’m now working on building some “chicken tunnels” so that in the spring I can let the girls out into a protected area of my backyard garden with aviary netting. That’s a work in progress so I won’t have photos for a while.

By the way, I was able to find a nontoxic sealer at my local Benjamin Moore paint store. Thanks again for the great plans. I spent months and countless hours searching for a coop and kept coming back to your design. Thanks for all the thought that went into it. My chickens are content  — and safe — in their new home.

–Cindy

Thanks, Cindy, for the photo and your great feedback. If you like Cindy’s coop or have found her advice helpful, please let her know with a quick comment below.

I’d love to say I do this for artistic reasons, à la Christo, but it’s really all about practicality. Plastic film is inexpensive, easy to put up, and keeps your hens dry and happy. And in the spring, you can just take it down, roll it up, and store it out of the way.

There are other solutions, of course — sheet siding, acrylic panels, canvas, landscape fabric. Let me know in the comments what has worked for you.

Tips on wrapping your coop with plastic sheeting

• Use plastic sheeting that’s durable enough to hold up in the wind. Thickness is measured in mils. I used a roll of 4-mil polyethylene film, which you should be able to get at any hardware store. For comparison, a heavy-duty garbage bag is around 2-mil thick.
• Roll out your plastic sheet to the length you need and cut it to size. You decide how much your chicken coop or run that you want to enclose based on your local weather, angle of the sun, etc. I’ve found that on our Garden Coop, covering the back, right, and at least part of the front side works well to keep out driving rain and up-splash from the drip line in the back. I bring the plastic up about 2/3 of the way, since the roof overhang does a good job of shielding the top third or so. I might cover more, including the area under the henhouse, if conditions become particularly harsh.
• Cut a couple of one-by-twos to the width of each section of the chicken coop that you want to cover, one to attach the film at the top and one at the bottom. If you want to secure any side edges, cut one-by-twos for those too.
• Roll the edge of your plastic sheet around the upper one-by-two a couple times, then attach with a screw on either end (1 1/4″ should do), driving through the plastic and the one-by-two into the studs on the coop. At the bottom, you can do the same thing, or just sandwich the plastic sheet between the one-by-two and the sole plate.
• You’ll see in the pictures below that my plastic sheet was wide enough to simply fold in half and still cover the height I needed, so instead of rolling at the edge, I just tucked the one-by-two into the fold to mount it at the upper end.

That’s it! For more tips, see our four-part series on preparing your chickens and chicken coop for the winter. And feel free to add any tips or questions in the comments below.

In particular, their Internal Wood Stabilizer product is ideally suited for chicken coops like The Garden Coop and The Garden Ark, safely protecting exposed exterior softwoods from rot and moisture damage in a way that stain or paint alone cannot.

Learn more and get the Timber Pro UV discount code here.

Randy and Christy used The Garden Ark mobile chicken coop plans to build a beautiful white and baby blue chicken tractor for their northern California flock. They also added an ingenious gravity-fed feeding system (made of PVC pipe) and a bucket watering system that mounts to the rear of the coop.

Take a look here, then visit their site for a detailed description of their mobile coop and instructions on how to make your own automatic PVC pipe feeder and bucket waterer for your chickens.

Thanks to Randy and Christy for sharing their ideas and pictures! If you have experience with a PVC chicken feeder or bucket waterer on your chicken coop, leave a comment below. What has worked? What would you do differently?

Richard and Ellen shared several pictures of their Garden Coop build along with notes about how they customized it for their California backyard. The rest of the post comes from them. . .

We just finished construction of a slightly modified Garden Coop, and we love it (as do our hens). Here are some of the changes we made:

Trapdoor in hen house floor

I altered the floor a bit. Effectively, we made a trapdoor so that we could sweep henhouse bedding out as needed. If I were doing it again, I’d make the trapdoor a bit deeper (extending further back from the henhouse access door). As it is, it’s not as helpful as it might be. However, my younger son loves it — it’s a secret door!

Reclaimed henhouse siding

We had recently replaced some rotted sections of the yard fence (visible behind the coop), and had some of the redwood fence boards left over. I went through it and determined which pieces were free of termites, cut them to size, and used them for some of the siding (they are the dark-colored boards).

For the rest, I bought 5 1/2″ cedar fence pickets, cut to size, and stained them with weatherproofing stain. I had used cedar-toned stain for the rest of the coop, and had some left over, so I used that for some of the boards. The others were stained with some leftover redwood-toned stain.

I used some of the dog-eared tops for the siding on the nesting boxes, which gave the ends a neat triangular cut-out pattern.

Outboard nesting boxes

Outboarding the nesting boxes was the one significant modification we wanted to make which wasn’t explained in your plans, so we sort of had to figure it out ourselves. [Editor's note: I now offer free plans for external nesting boxes.] I have a tendency to overbuild, so I think it would support about 120 pounds of chickens. *grin*

Arched entryway into the “Secret Layer”

I made the arched entry after being inspired by one of the coops on your website, in which the maker had made an arched entry. After making it, it seemed like a perfect spot for some sort of plaque, so I cut some scrap plywood to the right curve and gave it a single coat of weatherproofing stain. My two sons (6 and 9 years old) came up with the “Secret Layer” idea, and we did the painting and decoration (just acrylic paint) together.

About the chicken coop plans

Thanks for making such excellent plans. I’m a construction novice, and your plans made everything clear enough that I could build the chicken coop almost single handedly. Right now, we only have three chickens, but now that we have this lovely large coop, we’ll be adding a few more!  —Richard and Ellen

Many thanks to Richard, Ellen, and family for sharing their ideas and photos. Please leave a note in the comments if you like what they’ve built and found this post helpful. Then subscribe to Coop Thoughts so you never miss a post. It’s free, ad-free, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Reva hired a local handyman to build a modified Garden Coop to house her backyard chickens. She sited the coop beneath a large yard tree and reduced its size so that it would fit the space perfectly. Inside the henhouse, she framed in a raised lip around the hens’ entry hole in the floor to keep the litter in place.

Thanks to Reva for the pictures and ideas. Check out our coop plans to build your own stylish chicken coop or tractor. Or click to see more examples of what others are building.