Most people go out and purchase a new chicken coop when they need one but for those who are more eager, designing and building a chicken coop is always an option.  There are endless designs for chicken coops that you can work from and the best part is that this way you can add in all the special features you want.  Ensuring proper ventilation in the coop is one task you need to cover.  This is important because you don’t want your chickens breathing in stale air.

To ensure proper ventilation in the coop, make sure to include a built-in fan that is going to be high enough away from the chickens that they won’t get their feathers caught in it.   If you’re going to have your chickens and coop in a more urban area, make sure that there’s a top designed for the coop.  This way there’s less chance the chickens will escape, because the last thing you want is to have your chickens running loose on busy city streets.  If you live in a rural area you won’t have to worry so much about this but you’ll at least want to build the walls of your coop a bit higher for safety reasons.

Lighting is also important to have included in the design of your chicken coop.  During wintertime when the daytime hours are much shorter, egg production often drops significantly.  Have proper lighting installed in the coop and for extra convenience you can set the lighting up to a timer so it will always go off at just the right time.  This saves you the trouble of having to repetitively turn the lights on and off.

Insulation helps to keep the heat in during the wintertime.  In the wintertime it’s going to help keep the heat in and keep the chickens warm while in summer it will keep cool air conditioned air from escaping.  This is not only going to help by keeping the heat in during the wintertime but also keep the cool air in during the hot summer months.  There may be certain extra features like a built-in heater that you may be interested in including in the design as well.

As you get started you’ll see that designing chicken coops is really not all that difficult.  It gives you the freedom to customize your coop however you want and make it most suitable for your chickens.  This is going to make for some really annoyed hens and can cause them to get sick as well.  Once you’ve perfected the design and purchased all the supplies you need, you can get to work on the building process.