Content
Poultry breeding is a troublesome business and requires constant care for the bird population. In a suburban or dacha area, such conditions, as a rule, do not exist, so the vast majority build a chicken coop at the dacha with their own hands for a small number of birds, a maximum of five to seven chickens. As an option, you can order a simple wooden poultry house from a carpenter or buy any of the ready-made chicken coops for the country, sold at exhibitions and specialized stores. Most often this small chicken coop with walking, designed for the summer version of keeping poultry in the country, from March to November.
Which poultry housing option do you prefer?
Old and experienced poultry farmers say: “build it as if it were for yourself.” For chickens, even the simplest chicken coop is their home. If, after completion of construction, you can sit inside the built barn for chickens for a couple of hours without much discomfort, then the birds living in the country will also be happy.
There are quite a lot of ways and options to build a chicken coop at the dacha with your own hands, ranging from brick premises to carved huts made of timber and tongue-and-groove boards.The most popular for a summer residence is considered a simple chicken coop, which is easy to assemble yourself from OSB boards, plywood or unedged boards on a frame made of wooden beams, as in the video:
The use of wood as a building material allows you to obtain a number of additional advantages of a board and timber house for a summer residence in comparison with sandwiches or brick premises:
- The wooden structure of the chicken room is light and at the same time durable, which does not require a capital foundation;
- Using timber and boards allows you to do 99% of all work in a chicken coop at your dacha with your own hands, even if you do not have the professional skills of a joiner or carpenter;
- The wooden structure of the chicken coop can be easily supplemented and changed without radically rearranging the premises.
Unlike most modern building materials, wood does not frighten chickens; the wooden walls of the room have sufficient sound insulation so as not to hear rain or wind, and at the same time convey well the sounds and footsteps of night visitors. The disadvantages of a wooden chicken coop include poor protection from rats and mice, which can enter poultry houses for grain and steal eggs.
How to choose a place to build a chicken coop at your dacha
When choosing a place in the country for placing a residence for chickens, they are guided by the same principles as when installing any other wooden building.The morning sun should illuminate the windows and the entrance to the chicken coop to the maximum, warming up the cooled room and ridding it of excess moisture. In the midday heat, the chicken coop must be protected from direct sunlight, so if possible, the room is located under the crown of the tallest tree in the country house or covered with a fabric awning.
It is best to place the chicken coop away from the cottage building and garden beds, which will attract chickens to themselves like a magnet. There should be no cesspools or compost pits, sewers or other sources of infection near the walking area.
An excellent solution is to build a chicken coop as an extension to the cottage building. This makes it easier to heat the room and control the condition of the chickens. Often a chicken coop is attached to a summer kitchen in a country house, but if it is not heated in winter, there is little point in such a decision.
We build a chicken coop out of wood at the dacha
Before building a chicken coop, you will need to make a simple sketch, or better yet, a drawing with a layout of the location and internal chicken coop devices in the country. The average area norm is calculated as two chickens per square of usable area. Thus, for 5 chickens you will need 2.5 m2, and another 30% needs to be added under three nests. As a result, the theoretically calculated area of a five-person house will be 3.2 m2, but in practice, a small chicken coop, less than or about 2.8 m, is suitable for housing five chickens in the country2, with a ceiling height of 1.8 m, photo.
We will build a room for chickens at the dacha taking into account the following features:
- As a foundation, a typical cast columnar foundation for a dacha is best suited;
- The body of the chicken room is made on the basis of a frame made of 100x50 timber;
- The floor, ceiling and side walls are sheathed with tongue and groove boards;
- The roof is assembled according to a simple single-pitch scheme with the high side of the slope extending 50-60 cm.
Construction of the foundation and frame of the chicken coop
After choosing a place in the country for the construction of a chicken coop, it is necessary to make a preliminary marking of the soil and water level. If the soil at the dacha in the spring, after the snow and flood waters have melted, remains damp for a long time, most likely the water level is quite high, so you will need to make a full drainage and connect the pipe to the general drainage system of the dacha.
After marking the outline of the future chicken coop, we dig five holes 50 cm deep for casting or laying out the foundation pillars. At any dacha there will be old wire that can be used as reinforcement, and cutting boards for making formwork. The dimensions of the supports are 15x15cm, with a height above the ground of at least 30 cm. After the concrete has set, we clean the upper end of the pillars and level them along the general horizon.
From the timber we assemble the frame for the basement of the future chicken coop and lay the logs. To protect chickens from rats and mice, which hunt in abundance around the dacha, we stretch a fine-mesh metal mesh onto the timber, with a margin of at least 50 cm on the sides. After assembling the chicken coop frame, the edges of the mesh will be placed on the inner lining of the walls and nailed down.
At the next stage, you will need to install the corner posts of the frame, align them vertically and knock them down with temporary jumpers from the slab.After installing the upper belt of the frame made of timber and ceiling beams, the walls, floor and ceiling of the room are sewn up with tongue-and-groove and unedged boards, which can be found at the dacha.
To arrange the roof of the chicken coop, you can use roofing materials left over from the roof of the dacha, for example, old slate or metal. The best option is considered to be bituminous shingles or ondulin, but for the dacha, experts recommend slate as it is durable, non-flammable and resistant to the teeth of predators.
Finishing and arrangement of the chicken coop
The entrance to the chicken coop and the run must be positioned so that it is easily visible from the garden beds or porch of the dacha. In summer, chickens like to roost at sunset, and the closing time of the door to the chicken house must be constantly monitored. To be able to see how and when the chickens entered the chicken coop, from any point in the dacha, you can install a lamp above the entrance to the room or vestibule.
In addition to the main door, they often hang a second one, like a mosquito flap for a summer house, only instead of a polymer mesh, they use a steel mesh with a fine mesh. A window is arranged in a similar way.
The floor in the chicken room can also be insulated with materials left over from the renovation of the cottage. Do not use basalt or mineral wool for insulation, even if the roof or floor was insulated at the dacha with this material. Chickens hear odors very well and react poorly to vapors of phenol and phenol-based resins, and a relatively thin floor does not guarantee reliable protection. The easiest way is to lay a double layer of sheet foam and a film to protect against condensation, and be sure to install a vent under the subfloor to remove moisture.
Proper ventilation plays a special role in the life of chickens.The simplest is forced ventilation in the form of a small window in the back wall. An exhaust hole measuring 15x10 cm is cut out in the ceiling area, and the air flow is designed in the form of an air valve on the front door.
The walls of the chicken coop are insulated in the same way as the dacha. In the simplest case, the boards for internal wall cladding are covered on the outside with EPS sheets, covered with film and covered with wooden clapboard.
Chicken coop layout
Usually the internal space of the chicken coop is divided into two halves by a central passage, photo. Most of the chicken coop is allocated for arranging a roost; nests and feeders for chickens are installed in the smaller half of the room.
The floor in the chicken coop is covered with a layer of sand and sawdust, which protects the wood well from bird droppings and at the same time protects it from condensation.
During periods of severe frost, chickens may leave their roost and huddle together. In this case, you can lay a layer of straw, or use rags available at the dacha to close the cracks and the ventilation inlet valve to prevent the lower tiers of the chicken coop from freezing.
The walls and ceiling of the room for keeping chickens must be treated with a layer of lime. Experts recommend treating joints and cracks between boards, wherever insects and parasites can accumulate. The outer walls of the chicken coop are painted with light acrylic paints or coated with weather-resistant varnish, photo.
Conclusion
A wooden chicken coop is always light and warm. But in cold weather, when it is impossible to do without heating, wood becomes a source of increased risk from a fire safety point of view.Therefore, the wooden walls of the building for chickens have to be regularly treated with fire retardants, and the places where the heater is installed must be sheathed with metal sheets. In this case, the chicken room at the dacha will last quite a long time.
