Starting Work on the New Coop

We made the final decision to turn our shed into a new coop for the chickens. We were wavering back and forth and then decided to go ahead with the plan. It will be so much more space for the chickens and so much easier for me, no more hitting my head on the coop door when I go in! Plus it is much closer to the house.

In case you didn't read the previous post, here is the new shed we are converting over to a coop.

 Our first job was to empty out the shed completely. As you can see it was full of a lot of stuff. Every wall was full of shelves and shelves of stuff. It took us all day on Saturday to clean it out.

The shelves were nice, but they had to come down, since the chickens would jump up on them and make a big mess. I decided this was a good spot for the nest boxes.

So it was time to get the table saw out and get busy with all the cuts for the nest boxes.

We did our measurements and we ended up going to the scrap pile of wood that we had by the road for pickup. The white and brown small pieces were from cabinets we tore apart for pickup on trash day. Fortunate for us they had not picked up the wood yet, since they were perfect for the nest boxes. It took us awhile to get the measurements right, but eventually the plan worked.

We have a lot of shelf brackets, so we put them to good use to support the nest boxes and to keep them level. We found so many things when we cleaned up our garage and two sheds. It is amazing what you can collect in 18 years at a house. It makes me happy to be able to reuse some of the stuff that we already have on hand. Plus it saves money!

We needed to put a back on the boxes since there would be a gap between the bottom of the box and the floor because of the wall studs. We don't need all those eggs falling out the back!

  Here are the nest boxes, we ended up with 8 boxes total, which is double what they have now. We need to put a top on them still, but I am going to paint all the wood before we do that. I'll just use whatever color leftover paint we have on hand and if I do not have enough, I'll get some of the "oops" paint they have at Lowe's. I hope that they still have it for $5.