Getting them home was an experience!!! The cardboard boxes I aquired from a few shops at the railway station in York were very flimsy, but we somehow managed to get the chickens in them and got a taxi home.
The coop itself I bought from Ebay the week before. It cost £85.00, plus £14.99 delivery. It was flat-pack, so I needed to put it together, but it only took a couple of hours to do that. A few coats of wood preserver later, and it was ready for the ladies to move into.
The picture below shows the rear of the coop. There is a slide-out litter tray area, which makes the daily poo-picking easy.
The front of the coop is shown in the picture below. There is a pop hole with catch which the chickens go in and out of via a wooden ramp (not shown). Above the pop hole, there is a vent slat, which provides ventilation for the birds.
Apparently these types of coop don't last too long, as the wood is pretty flimsy, so I can start saving for a better one. I'm hoping that the wood preserver I have used will at least allow me to use it for a few seasons before the coop needs replacing. A lot of chicken keepers use sheds which they convert to make them suitable for keeping poultry, so will look into that in due course. We have had a lot of heavy rain recently, but the coop we have has remained dry, so fingers crossed it will last a fair while.
We constructed a run from timber and chicken wire mesh. The run itself is about 12ft by 10ft, and the mesh was about 3ft deep. 3ft. Hmmmm, it wasn't long before we discovered that 3ft wasn't going to be deep enough!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment