Peter and Maelanie’s Garden Coop Chicken Coop with Pergola

Peter and Maelanie used The Garden Coop walk-in chicken coop plans as a jumping off point for their beautiful Wisconsin coop. The rest of this post comes straight from them. . .

We downloaded your plans and built our own coop off the back of our garage during spring break. Pretty pleased with the results, if I do say so! Due to our space constraints, I tweaked the dimensions of the coop somewhat, but was able to use most of the construction plans to ensure a good build.

• I chose to sink 4×4 lumber below the frost line for the front support posts and buried hardware cloth around the perimeter as outlined in the plans.
• We extended the pergola-style roof trusses off both ends of the coop, as we had extra space along the garage wall. One end of the roofline extends over the garage back door (hopefully for easier access to the egg door and supplies during the winter months), and the other shelters our feed and bedding bins and utility/cleanup area. To shield the run from the neighbor’s view, we added a trellis which will soon host climbing vines on that end, too.
• Because the coop roof slants to the rear, and we chose to build it attached to our existing garage, I ran a length of rain gutter along the back wall of the coop which empties into a rain barrel near the utility area.
• We found a kitchen cabinet at our local ReStore to mount below the external egg box (fashioned after the plans on your site) to store easy-access supplies like grit, scratch, and feed, and we painted it to match the rest of the coop.
• They also had remnant linoleum which I used for our henhouse floor.
• Rather than building our own coop door, we found two identical screen doors at the ReStore, one of which I re-screened with hardware cloth for the coop, and the other of which I installed on the garage people-door to match.
• I was able to find a plug-in, thermostat-controlled lamp switch for our heat lamp and a fan inside the henhouse — well-worth the investment in this springtime’s cool nights and this summer’s recent heat. A remote thermostat sensor lets us know the temp inside the henhouse from our kitchen window area. Southern Wisconsin has the most extremes as far as temperatures are concerned. We haven’t yet double-insulated the henhouse walls, but we’ll see how things go!

—Peter & Maelanie

More photos of their chicken coop. . .

Many thanks to Peter and Maelanie for sharing their ideas. If you like what they’ve done or found their photos helpful in building your own backyard chicken coop, please let them know with a comment below.