Before you just jump and run with the idea of building your own chicken coop, think about the reasons you don't want to do it incorrectly.
There are dangers to be avoided.
Good planning is an essential part of building a proper chicken coop, and keeping your chickens from suffering from mistakes.
You may be asking yourself what kind of dangers, after all, they're just chickens.
But there is a lot more to keeping chickens than just throwing them under a roof.
They need to be kept warm.
Hens absolutely love the sun, and they need a whole lot of it per day to lay eggs properly.
So your coop needs to be facing where it can get the most sunlight in the course of a day.
If the season won't allow for around fourteen hours, you may need to rig some lighting.
Ventilation has to be good as well as warmth.
Chickens have droppings that are very strong, and emit ammonia and carbon dioxide, and both of these can be deadly for your birds if left unchecked.
That's part of why good planning is so important in the construction of one of these coops.
A lot of people turn to the pre-fab coops.
But if you learn how to do it yourself, not only will you save a bundle, but you may pick up a few dollars helping somebody else.
A coop that is commercially constructed may run you anywhere from five hundred dollars up to twenty-five hundred.
But if you just do it yourself, and it isn't hard, you can build one for under one hundred dollars.
Drainage is a big consideration.
If you don't get good drainage, then you'll get a sludge effect full of droppings that can be tracked to the nesting boxes, and cause disease among your birds.
You have to always keep your egg production in mind.
In order to see the best results, each chicken will need at least three square feet of space all for itself.
You never want to have too many piled up chickens competing for space.
This causes an adverse reaction in egg production.