Brad’s Backyard Chicken Coop from Plans, Seattle, Washington

Brad’s Garden Coop walk-in chicken coop build shows off a real attention to detail, especially on the siding around the hen house. It’s got a great color scheme — the green tone contrasting nicely with the natural cedar. Most importantly, it looks like Brad and his family had a lot of fun with the project. The rest of this post and photos come from him. . .

How Brad modified the chicken coop design

I did make a few changes from the plans:

• • I flipped the design, putting the hen house on the right and the run on the left.
  • I added “face-out” two-by-fours below the hen house on all four sides.
  • I used cedar tongue and groove siding rather than fence boards and inset the siding into the frame. This necessitated a few minor changes (added two-by-twos to nail into, installing the siding from the bottom up, etc.) and allowed me to build the two doors a little differently. Instead of backing with plywood, I just glued the T&G together and added some one-by-two bracing.

• I put the ramp along the back wall.
• And I changed a few other minor things here and there.

Painting the chicken coop and adding finishing touches

As you can see in the pictures, the frame is painted green (Osmo Park Lane in Fir Green). The siding is treated with a clear product called PolyWhey from Vermont Natural Coatings.

I’d recommend the Osmo paint without reservation, but the PolyWhey was a little weird to work with. It’s about the same consistency as water, which makes applying it evenly to rough wood a bit challenging. It also dries (and hardens) so quickly that I could feel my brushes gradually stiffening as I applied it. It’s water-soluble, but the ossified brushes were unsalvageable.

On the other hand, the end result is great. I painted the henhouse floor with some cheap porch paint from Home Depot that made me all the more thankful for the odor-free Osmo and VNC stuff.

My review of The Garden Coop walk-in chicken coop plans

Overall, the plans are absolutely wonderful: detailed enough for a novice, but not so rigid that you can’t wander off and do things your own way where appropriate. On behalf of our whole family (and our four adolescent chickens), thank you!  —Brad

A few more photos of us building our own chicken coop . . .

Many thanks to Brad and his family for sharing their tips 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.