www.tanstaafl.co.uk

We’ve had our current chicken houses for at least fifteen years and they’re really starting to look tired now. I’d been mulling over designing my own for a while because the style I’d used previously turned out to have a few issues. In particular they were hard to clean because it wasn’t possible to get inside them, the roof had to be removed to clean them and chickens sometimes pecked at eggs in the nesting boxes. I also wanted something that stood well off the ground to discourage rats from nesting underneath. The entrances on the old design had a sliding door, but this often clogged up with mud in wet weather, or even froze closed in cold weather.

This is what I came up with.

The entire house sits on posts driven into the ground giving a gap of about 30cm underneath. The posts can be levelled by themselves, which means the house sits level without any bother. The door now hinges upward.

It’s also quite tall and there’s a full-height side door allowing access for cleaning.

The nesting box has a sloping floor (about 15°) so the eggs roll to the back when they’re laid, and a partition stops the hens reaching them when they do.

It’s an improvement, but not yet perfect. I think the nesting boxes may need a mesh floor to allow droppings to fall through. It’s possible that they would benefit from a hinged roof too so that the divider can be lifted out. My wife also thinks that the slope on the roll-away floor needs to be steeper.