Megan’s Nashville Chicken Coop from The Garden Coop Plans

As an early and active participant in Urban Chicken Advocates of Nashville, artist Megan Lightell helped with the push to make backyard chickens legal in Tennessee’s capital. And when the ordinance finally passed in early 2012, she celebrated right away by building her dream coop. The rest of this post comes directly from her. . . . 

Just wanted to thank you again for The Garden Coop chicken coop plans and to let you know that we finished our coop! We made a few minor alterations and added some embellishments:

• Used local cedar for the dimensional lumber and salvaged barn wood from Tennessee tobacco barns for the siding.
• Trimmed the window with wood from the barn that stood on my childhood home.
• Weaved a green sapling through the door frame and landscaped with small boulders all around.
• Added hinged doors to the bottom of each side to allow access to a rotational day-grazing area. The hens graze in one large garden area to the side of the coop, then will rotate to the other side at the end of the cool weather season, enabling us to plant fall crops where the current grazing area is. And the hens will clean out the remnants of the cool-weather crops that are currently growing in the garden area.

We love it! Couldn’t be happier. It is our dream coop, and we love having our hens visible from the back of the house, just off our patio. Now that our hens are legal, we are so happy to enjoy them and welcome them into the garden. They are happier than ever with the extra space, and the coop is so easy to maintain. The plans were great — very easy to follow.

More photos of Megan’s backyard chicken coop and garden

Many thanks to Megan for sharing her coop photos and notes on building with The Garden Coop walk-in chicken coop plans. If you like what she’s created, please let her know with a note below. And if you find our posts helpful and want to receive email notifications as posts are published, subscribe to Coop Thoughts.