new chicken keeper needs help

[alison barnett]

Hi everybody my husband has finally said yes to me keeping chickens it only took me 2 years for gentle persuasion Ha Ha. I have an area of 4 X 14 feet to put a permanent run on with a chicken house for 6 birds. He has given me a budget of £200 to build it has is happy to give me a little help building it. We have been looking around the web sites and cannot believe how expensive hen houses are. Any suggestions on how I can achieve my dream chicken house. I would like the run to be tall enough so I can walk in it, what size hen house would I need, what flooring would you recommend i.e. concrete floor with wood chips or soil floor with wood chips. Any plans on how to build a chicken house. I would like to do it right first time

[Hilary B]

The run is the easy bit, just a few posts and some appropriate mesh. For a cheap-but-quite-good house, any shed-like structure you can get hold of and which will take a perch (1 ft of perch per bird, minimum, above the level of the nestbox). You want an easy-clean floor below the perch. If you can get hold of a traditional tea-chest, that would make an adequate nestbox.
The alternative is a lot of exterior grade plywood, some 2" x 2" timber and a fair bit of DIY, but the design doesn't need to be fancy. A big box with a door and some roofing felt on top, a smaller box inside it with straw in, a perch...... Plywood comes in 8 ft by 4 ft sheets, so to minimise cutting up I would go for a 4 ft square shed, 6 ft high (or a bit more if you are tall) and use the 'leftover' bits from the walls to make a nestbox.
Chooks aren't fussy<g>

[parrot1974]

We've put our permanent coop and run on the old concrete base of a shed, though it's going a bit in places, so we weld-meshed the bottom of the run anyway, just to be on the safe side. For litter, we put about 3 inches of earth from the garden on top of the weldmesh, followed by a big bag of Hemcore, which gave us another 3 inches or so on top and some for the coop. They love it and it does seem to keep the smell down. We bought rolls of strong weld-mesh from Scats for £15 a roll and needed 3 (plus a tiny bit from a 4th) - much cheaper than the panels. The Hemcore costs about £8 a pack and should give you enough for 4 inches or so on a run your size. I think our coop and run cost us about £150 to make, using a mixture of woods - we found builders merchants (Travis Perkins) were better for cheap wood, but be careful of perches and ramps, as they need to be splinter-free.

[rats]

we took six ex bat hens ,two months ago a cost of 50p per bird,we normally get 4 eggs per day we purchased a hen coop on ebay brand new last december price 58£ 30£ postage they have settled well but be warned choose your site well, down wind because no matter what you do when it rains they stinkif you have fussy neighbours you might fall out food is cheap fresh eggs daily and sell spare eggs £1 six,no matter what you use for the floor run they like to scratch and dig

[parrot1974]

be warned choose your site well, down wind because no matter what you do when it rains they stink

I've found that Hemcore stops them from smelling, and my OH is obsessive about smells, so am very glad. But we've only got 4 in there.

[JILLY JACKSON]

Have read about hemcore where do you buy it?

[parrot1974]

Got it from Scats Country Stores, but anywhere that sells horse bedding etc. It really does seem to work, but you need to 'water it in' when it's first laid, which activates the smell-reducing properties (don't know the technical details!). If you got to Hemcore - Animal Bedding & Hemp Fibre I think it has a list of suppliers.

[JILLY JACKSON]

Brilliant!thanks parrot.

[smallholder dreamer]

My first post on this site!
Couldn't help but be interested in the Hemcore -never heard of it until now!
Anyway know exactly what you mean about the smell when it rains!! I have found my way around that. My chooks have to stay in one place as my garden is quite small. Finally found a way to sort the stink fairly cheaply - each week when I clean out the house I lay down another layer of straw which I buy in a bale and store under a tarpaulin behind the compost bin! This lasts months (depending on how tight the bale is) and I can buy it from a pet shop in town for £3! Every 6-8 months we rake it all out and stuff it in the compost bin ready for the garden once it has rotted down. That smells quite nice and the chooks love scratching it up. Inside the house I put untreated wood shaving which smells nice and soaks up the pooh nicely thanks. I get that from a local tradesman for the price of the fuel to drive there! I was lucky in that my hubby is very talented and built my house for about £100. Wood is expensive. I think I would go for a shed for my next though as you can get into it easier without grovelling on hands and knees!

[MaureenHall]

That's great Like the idea of a shed when this coop has had it's day! I'd just like to make a small point though. All the books I've read, and all the advice I've been given, say that you should use dust-extracted wood shavings. Apparently the dust can cause respiratory problems

[di]

We've recently got chooks& we converted 1 of our sheds(unfortunately the wrong one due to size so Andi had to link our other one to it to make more room~was easier than taking down run to simply swap over sheds!~long story i wont bore you with!!)anyway~we simply put in some shelves & scrounged old fruit boxes to make nesting area&a friend had just chopped down an apple tree so aquired some perfectly sized perches for free.The only outlay was the wire for the run.depending on how desperate you are to get them sooner rather than later I'd hold out to see what materials may come your way!All the best&enjoy your chooks.

[alison barnett]

Thanks for all the help

Thankyou everyone for all the help that you have given me and i hope that this will allow me to look after my chickens well and give them a long and happy life. My husband is getting more involved now and i think that even he is getting excited about the chooks and all the free eggs! He's drawn up plans for the coop and is starting to build it next week but it took him a year to complete the guinie pig run so im not holding my breath. The only problem is the run is backing onto a neighbours garden and even though they have not said anything, i think that they are a little bit concerned about the smell. Does anyone have any advice about the flooring of the run to keep the smell down. I've read about hemcore and if i put this into the run, im wondering how often would i have to change it and if i have to mix it with anything else, i.e. woodchips.

Thanks again!
Ali

[sunflower]

There are several things you can do to keep the smell done. Firstly, attack the smell at it's source!! You can do this by adding Bokashi bran into their feed. This results in a firmer formed pooh(sorry for being specific) and cuts down the smell by at least two thirds. Secondly, you can add Garlic(from a horsey store...not supermarket) just half a teaspoon to each feed, as this will also cut down the smell. Aubiose/hemcore is brilliant for cutting down smells...again supplied by any horsey store. Also, you can sprinkle Citrenella and euycaliptis(ca'nt spell..tired) onto the hemcore. This stops flies entering the runand gives their bedding a lovely fragrance. Hope this helps.
Also, if your hens are going to be kept in the run most or all of the time, each evening, just go around the run, picking up the hens' droppings. I have also found that often the smell is coming from unexpected places.......like their water!! During hot weather it soon becomes smelly, as the hens dip their dirty beaks into the water after eating, so there is a residue of food left.

[armadillo]

Hi, welcome to the world of chickens! I got my three a week ago, just gave them their first thorough clean-out, and have noticed no smell at all. The litter I'm using in the run was recommended by the lovely lady at Cotswold Chickens, it's called 'woody pet' and sounds like it may be similar to Hemcore in that you mix it with a little water & it fluffs up into sawdust-like litter that's very absorbent and so far has done an excellent job of preventing smells. It works out as cheap as samdust as it expands so much - about £3.50 a bag I think.
I think a soil floor is best as they like to scrabble about - the lady who sold me the hens said not no use wire netting inside to stop foxes burring as the chooks'll eventually cut their feet on it when they scratch about. A 20cm or wider 'skirt' of paving slabs &/or wire mesh(well pegged down) will stop foxes as they don't like to hang around for as long as it'd take to tunnel under it. I've been thinking of rigging up an 'intruder alert' system with string & tin cans too, but that might be going too far!

[Kristen]

"A 20cm or wider 'skirt' of paving slabs &/or wire mesh(well pegged down) "

Our Eglu has a 20 cm skirt, which just rests on the ground (its rigid netting, sort of like reinforcing mesh) (the whole thing can be moved easily)

"string & tin cans too,"

I've seen a double-strand electric livestock-fence-wire used - at about fox-nose-height which I imagine is pretty effective at stopping Charlie Fox hanging around too long!

The skirt looks like this: