Chicken Coop Improvements

In early January we had two consecutive weekends of partly-sunny skies and mid-40s temperatures, which gave us a jump start on some outdoor projects. The chicken coop needs some improvements before we can bring home a couple hens in the spring, so we started there.

The chicken run/yard area around the coop was really overgrown with weeds and blackberries, so first we cleared all of that out. Now we can finally walk around inside the entire enclosure!

Here's a before shot from early spring last year, before the yard became overgrown:

Fire thing Nick did was unhinge and flip that wall with the door as shown below so now the little chicken entrance is on the right side of the coop, which solved the problem of the chicken ladder being in the way of the human entrance. Nick also fastened extra gate latches to make the human entrance door more secure from predators. He also attached hook and eye latches in such a way that we can now keep the hinged front wall shown below open and safely attached to the 2 x 4 supports above when we need to clean out the inside of the coop.

Painting was the next big piece. The coop was white, but we wanted something more colorful. We selected this reddish-orange, which kind of makes the coop resemble one of those big red barns. 

Kind of matches Nick's vest too

First coat complete

On another nice weekend we'll put on a second coat of paint, clean out the inside of the coop, increase the size of the access door to the nesting box. After that we'll be adding a removable tray to the nesting box to make it easier to clean and finally line the coop with shavings. Then just add chickens. They don't really lay eggs unless it's warmer so now is the perfect time to get this all prepared for spring.

Pierre checking out the coop