The Home Yard Chicken House

When we get back to our farm, Puzzling Gully, in July we have a lot of work to do.  We want to try to get some animals and a vegie garden going as soon as possible.  We are going to take a month off to clean up the garden and do a few things to the house. 

I am tasked with building the vegie garden and getting a chicken house built.  I have had some free time so i have been planning and thinking about the Chicken house. 

When we were in the United states last year we saw a lot fo American styles barns, in all sorts of colours, but especially dark red.  There are a few different types but they are similar in that they have a central main roof with two lateral sloping rooves coming off on each side.  We thought we would adapt that in some way to our home yard chicken shed.  This will be our egg layer shed with our pet type chickens in it.  They aren’t for any serious commercial production, just to watch and enjoy and dig about in the home yard area.

So i have drawn up some pictures and then i made a 3D version on Google Sketchup 8.  This program is amazing and very helpful.  It is free to download and enables anyone to draw very realistic to scale 3d drawings. 

I then used Picasa (also by Google) to make a little movie of the chicken shed so i could show everyone the shed from all angles.  The movie is stop frame from jpeg stills but works to its needed purpose.  Have a look and see what you think.  We are thinking of painting the wood red, like the American barns.

 

Now that you have seen the Video.  We are going to have a central house where the chickens sleep at night, get out of the weather and lay their eggs.  The eggs will be collected from the outside so no need to get into the house.  We are going to have a run on either side of the house and alternate its use.  We will rake over the dirt and plant it out with grasses and maybe some vegies and then swap as each side gets dug up by the chickens.  We will probably do this every 2-3 months, depending on how things grow.  This also helps to decrease the parasite lifecyle, we’ll be worming them anyway though.

There will be an entrance door to each run on either end and then there is an entrance to the house at the back, for cleaning etc.

We are going to insulate the roofing to try and help the chickens stay a bit cooler in our hot Qld summers.  I don’t know what i will use yet but i have ideas.  We want to have a waterer and feed station on both sides and we will connect the water up to a tank or the house pressure pump, so the water will always be refilling via a float valve.  That way we can go away for a few days and the chickens will have water and a 10-15kg full feeder to keep them happy.

When we are home we can let them out to peck about the homeyard.

What do you think?  In July this will be built and i will put up photos of the finished product.

The Home Yard Chicken House