Build your dream hen house

[burek]

If you had the opportunity to build the dream hen house, what 'features' would it definitely include? What would you NOT include? I am picking your brains... a newbie planning to have chickens in the next few weeks. We have a location (under some apple trees) and a pre existing concrete base for the hen house (about 1.5 metre square) in the corner of our land (leaving only two sides available for an enclosure). Can't buy electric fencing cheaply here (and we do get power cuts!). We live in a country where concrete blocks are cheaper than wood for construction. And we get very cold winters (-20ish and lots of snow).

What would you do? How high would you build? Where would you put access? etc etc

[ohareward]

Hi Burek, from New Zealand. Will you be getting chooks for eggs only, or for meat. Either way the main thing with chooks is that they need a safe enviroment and the house needs to be free from draughts. They will need some form of insulation, especially in the winter. What will you put on the roof, because that is where most of the heat will go. The roof definitely needs double insulation. The house will also need some form of ventilation. We are lucky here in New Zealand as timber is cheaper than concrete blocks. Although we can get blocks that have polystyrene in the middle, so that would be good for insulating.
Nesting boxes can be for individual hens or a communal one X four birds. Individual boxes will need to be 30-35cm high, wide and deep with clean straw in each box. A concrete floor is good as it can be cleaned easier. I put clean untreated sawdust on my floor and when it gets too much bird droppings in it I clean it out and put it in a special heap to rot down. It makes good manure.
Feeding and watering are important. Also what you can and cannot give them from the kitchen.
For laying birds the space needed is about 60-70 square/cm per bird. This is just a brief outline on keeping chooks. I use Google as my home page so you can just type in laying hens and see what comes up. Nothing like freerange eggs. Robin.

[burek]

Thanks for the reply- all useful stuff. We are complete novices at this but everyone starts somewhere. On the one hand it is great to start with a blank slate...but on the other hand it does make one feel a bit ignorant!

We'll be keeping them for both eggs and meat.

What do you - or anyone else - think of apples as part of their diet? We have a big surplus of apples on the ground from last autumn and they are all around the hen house. It would be great if it meant free and good food for them, in combination with other stuff. Our neighbour says that too many apples give his cow a runny belly... On that basis, would it be sensible to limit their consumption of apples? Any experience of this?

[Millymollymandy]

Hi Burek

My hens love apple and I give them some chopped as a treat every day at the moment, but only about 2/3rds of an apple a day. I am using up the stored apples from my orchard and they are a bit too rubbery for us now, so I give them to the wild birds and the hens. I don't think apple specifically gives them the runs, although my hens sometimes have dirty bums no matter what they eat! But perhaps it would be a good idea to gather up the fallen apples and limit the amount they get given.

I can't help with building a hen house but it does need space for a roosting perch and nest boxes. How many birds are you thinking of getting? I have 2 nest boxes and 3 hens, but they always want to use the same one!

[burek]

Very glad to hear the apples will be useful, Millymollymandy. Thank you.

We're going to start with 3 and see how we get on. There's only 3 of us to feed so I think even with 3 there will sometimes be an excess of eggs. We'll be making sure there is space in the henhouse for more in future though.

[Wombat]

Go for a chook tractor Burek! Go for a chook tractor! (A bottomless chook house that is half or so covered and half wired that you move from place to place!)

Nev

[pol]

We have 3 chickens! Hattie, Clucky and Zola... we made a hen house high up on a pole with a flimsy ladder for them to climb. Sounds a bit strange but it means that the hens are totally self sufficient as they get up in the morning when they want and climb up to bed in the evening whenever they feel tired... and this way we don't always have to get home or up in the mornings to shut them away/let them out.

If a fox ever came sniffing about, he can't make it up the ladder without breaking it. Our neighbour has ducks which sadly keep getting 'got' by foxes so we do have them around, it's just they can't get to our chickens.

It took us about 3 days to train Zola and Clucky to climb up and down and Hattie a week (smaller brains in speckledys?!) - I'd never consider any other type of hen house now. Hope this helps...

Good luck and have fun with them!

[techno_bob]

Don't know if this is of any interest help... but we have several arks around the place like this...



We use this one as a bit of a hospital wing for the cockerels that are being picked on in the fattening pen!!!

8ft long... 4ft wide at the base... plywood all along one side (which we turn to the prevailing wind... took me about two house each to construct...[/url]