Your Guide to Building a DIY Chicken Coop for Your Backyard

You want to build a DIY chicken coop for your background, but you don’t know where to start. You have these chicken coop ideas but still have plenty of questions. Do you want to install an automatic chicken coop door? How do you make sure there’s enough water inside the chicken coop?

As you might expect, the chicken coop design is vital because a well-designed coop will allow your hens to maximize egg production, whereas a bad design could be potentially unsafe. So let’s explore what goes into making a good DIY chicken coop, and go into the process step-by-step. By the end of this guide, you'll have a great addition to your property that only increases backyard fun. 

Why Build Your Own? 

Building your chicken coop gives you much more freedom to decide on the design.

As with building a DIY picket fence, building your own DIY chicken coop comes with a lot of advantages over simply buying one. For one, you stand to save money. A good DIY chicken coop design can be constructed using whatever materials you have lying around, including good-quality old wooden pallets and other items that would otherwise be unused. For instance, you might need a mid-sized chicken coop but find only small chicken coops and large chicken coops at the store. Since you will be doing it yourself, you can build according to your specific needs.

How Big Should the DIY Chicken Coop Be? 

Your coop may be quite large or relatively small, depending on how many chickens you get and how big they are.

Although building your DIY chicken coop does give you more size options, you should know that there are recommended minimum dimensions for chicken coop designs. These involve how much space the chickens need to live comfortably and produce eggs. The general rule of thumb is that Bantams require about two square feet of space in the coop and four square feet in the run, meaning the place where they get to walk outside the coop. 

Standard large fowl need about four square feet in the coup, and eight square feet in the run and very large hens need a chicken coop barn that is about eight square feet, and the same amount of space in the run. 

For your chicken coop design, you want to give a minimum of three square feet of space per chicken in the coop. This is important as a cramped chicken coop will negatively impact your hens and their egg productivity. In addition, if there is not enough room, hens tend to peck and pluck each other because it's an unhealthy living environment. The run is also a crucial part of the design since the hens need enough space to walk around and to keep healthy. 

Where Should the Chicken Coop Go? 

Where you place the chicken coop is also essential for keeping your birds healthy. You want to avoid standing water inside your chicken coop. Your DIY chicken coop needs to be installed on high ground to avoid excessive moisture, mud, and flooding. A perpetually wet coop is quite bad for your hens’ hygiene, so if your yard has no high ground, we recommend elevating your coop. 

This will require building stilts and adding a chicken coop ladder so the hens can still get in, but it’s well worth the trouble. It’s also best to put the DIY chicken coop somewhere you pass by regularly, as this will help keep predators away. You also don’t want the coop to always be in the shade. Sunlight increases egg-laying, and high tree canopies can give cover to predators such as falcons. 

How do I Keep Away Predators? 

Keep hungry foxes and other critters away from your prized hens with some sturdy hardware mesh.

As gardeners know, destructive wildlife is a common backyard problem affecting plants and chickens alike. Foxes might look very cute, but they will gladly steal your chickens for a midnight snack if you give them the chance. You can say the same for raccoons, weasels, and other critters. For this reason, your chicken coop design must include a sturdy half-inch hardware wire mesh to enclose the bottom three feet of the chicken run, and you should also apply this to all the openings of the DIY chicken coop as well. The hardware cloth mesh is robust, so predators cannot bite through it, keeping your chickens safe.  

How to Build a DIY Chicken Coop

Gather Your Materials 

First, to build your DIY chicken coop you’ll need to get all the materials and tools you need. Unless you plan to build an aluminum chicken coop, you’ll want to stick with wood and keep things simple. If you want to get some serviceable wood for free, check out your local lumber mill, because they may have wood that would otherwise be tossed out that you can repurpose. Also, look to a local store, as they’ll regularly have wooden pallets they need to remove. We recommend using a band saw or a hand saw for cutting the pieces of wood to size, and be sure to swing by the hardware store and pick up: 3-inch exterior screws, hinges, hardwire mesh, vents, and some paint.

Cutting and Putting Everything Together  

Your chicken coop design dimensions should be based on the size of the chickens you plan to have. Assuming you’re building an average-sized DIY chicken coop, the side walls of the coup will be about five by five feet. The dimensions of the forward and rear panels of the coop will hinge on how many chickens you have, so let’s assume you have three. 

Cut up some old pallets to make the parts you need for your DIY chicken coop.

Since you need three square feet of room per chicken, your forward and rear panels will be about nine by five feet, making your coop nine feet long, five feet wide, and five feet high. The roof will have to be slightly larger so that you have a good margin of error, meaning it will need to be about ten feet long and six feet wide. 

For the run hardware mesh enclosure, a decent-sized run will have to be about ten feet long and nine feet wide, and the height can be lowered by at minimum three feet. You’ll need hardware mesh and a few planks of wood framing to enclose the run adequately. If you have a falcon problem, one good chicken coop idea is to enclose the top of the run with hardware mesh, meaning you’ll need a ten-foot by nine-foot section of mesh.    

Doors and Ventilation 

If you want your chickens to be free range, you need a door to keep them safely locked up during the night and then let them out in the morning. You could get a simple chicken coop door from any hardware store and leave it at that, but we recommend considering an automatic option. Automatic chicken coop doors are programmed to open in the mornings and close at night, saving you plenty of time for other home projects. Moreover, an automatic door also gives you peace of mind since you can be sure your chickens are safely locked away from predators every night.

There are also extra solar electric goodies that you can use to bring your DIY chicken coop into the twenty-first century. Solar chicken coop lights are essential nowadays as they increase hen productivity by providing extra light in the coop. We also recommend incorporating a chicken coop heater into your design. These are easy to find at any big box store and keep your hens going strong even on the coldest of winter days.  

Ventilation is another vital detail of any chicken coop design. As any qualified HVAC contractor will tell you, ventilation helps keep moisture out, prevents mold growth, keeps the air fresh, and keeps indoor temperatures mild. The rule of thumb is that you want to have one square foot of vents for every ten square feet of floor space. It’s also a good chicken coop idea to add at least one window to your coop as this will further improve ventilation and let some light in. 

When it comes time to paint your chicken coop we recommend going with lighter colors as these will help reflect more sunlight and keep the chicken coop cooler.

Colors

Once your DIY chicken coop is all put together, it's time to think about chicken coop colors. Because this isn't a rent-to-own chicken coop, you are free to let your chicken coop paint ideas run wild. Having said that, we do have a few recommendations for you to consider. Since you want to keep the coop at an optimal temperature, it's best not to make your chicken coop colors too dark.

For this reason, we recommend going with white, yellow, red, orange, or a combination of colors. That way your DIY chicken coop will reflect more sunlight and stay cool even on the hottest summer days. If you want to branch out with chicken coop color ideas, you can also try purple since this color is slightly darker but not too dark to lose all reflective qualities.