Up
DIY Do-It-Yourself Chicken Coop
Ham Radio
Motorcycling
Hunting
Building Our Pond
Raised Bed Gardening
WM8C's Link Directory
Christian Pages
Inspirations
I Quit Smoking
Custom Injection Molding
Plastic Injection Molding I
Photography
Morel Mushrooms
Metal Detectors
DIY Enclosed Trailer
Article Submission Questions
Astrids Embroidery
Tribute to America
Win An Award
Awards I've Won
Vote Exchange
PSP Tutorials
Pond Set
PSP Projects
Web Tools
Web Rings
Astrid's Embroidery

Now that we have basically finished the outside of our chicken coop, we are now going to turn our attention to the inside areas that still need our attention. In this photo you are seeing the nest box opening we built earlier from the inside. As we mentioned before, the nest boxes are actually outside of the main chicken coop walls. Since already have our main area prepared, we now need to create the separate boxes within this area. 

The dimensions of these boxes when completed are going to be 12" in width, which for most of your average size chickens, are a good size to give them some freedom of movement in the nest area and yet help them to feel secure when they are using them. Here you can see that we used left over scraps to make our divider slots.  You can see one panel installed on the left side of the photo which was 12" x 12".  We wanted these to be removable for later service if needed.

*tip - we ended up increasing the height of the initial dividers by 6" because our chicks initially wanted to roost on the top of the dividers.  You don't want this because then they are pooping in the nest boxes during the night and you want to discourage any sleeping in or around the nest boxes to keep the eggs clean.

In this photo you can see that we have installed all of the nest box dividers.  Laying flat in front of the nest boxes is the 4" high front panel with the divider slats installed which will also help hold the dividers in place.

In this photo, the front panel is now in it's permanent location.  This panel will also help keep the nest materials (straw in our case) from easily falling out onto the floor of our coop.

Here we have so installed the perch post in front of the boxes.  We used 2 x 2's for the perches as it is importand to use something large enough for the chickens to get a good grip on.  Using materials too small for their feet can damage their feet as well as make it difficult for them to get into the boxes.

This photo is a close up of the perch installed in front of the nest boxes. You can see that we left about a 4" gap between the nest boxes and the perch.  If you remember, this was determined by the length of 2 x 4 we left exposed into the coop area when we constructed our nest boxes originally.

Because we live in a area of fairly harsh winters, and the nest box side of our chicken coop faces the west which is where our prevailing winds come from here in Michigan, we decided to add a little extra comfort for the chickens with a little weather stripping.  We used a strip of rubber about 4" wide to do this and just mounted it under the hinged edge of our external nest box door.

Close up view of the rubber strip we used as an extra resistance to wind blowing in through the crack from the door slot. It's mounted behind the door itself and the door compresses it down when closed. This should help keep drafts off of the hens when they are in the nests and the wind is howling like it often does around here.

WM8C's Ham Links & More
Copyright 2002 - 2009
All rights reserved.
 this site created and maintained by WM8C