If you are planning to build a Do It Yourself (DIY) chicken house for your backyard, here’s a couple of tips that you can use.

When preparing the flooring of the chicken coop, use dried straw. The chicken house should be littered at all time with straw six to eight inches deep. When it becomes wet or damps, the straw should be replaced. A fresh layer of straw should also be laid when the old straw is badly broken or full of droppings.

When dropping broad is used on the DIY chicken coop, it should be cleaned at least once a week. No doing do will lead to disease germs and the accumulation of mites.

Furthermore, if the bird droppings are not cleaned, the feet of the chicken become soiled hence causing large percentage of dirty eggs. In some severe cases, toxic gases are given off decaying manure.

If you want to keep your bantams healthy, the chicken housing should be thoroughly cleaned at least once a year. Use a 3 percent mixture of compound solution or cresol or a good stock dip to soak every part of the coop.

When raising chicken in your backyard, the most common poultry parasites are mites and lice. Usually you will find mites beneath the perches or in the corners of the nests rather than on the fowl’s body. The mites will only attach to the chicken’s body long enough to feed.

Mites can be killed easier by using a can of aerosol. The make sure you get all the mites, repeat the spraying process 2 or 3 times. This is in order to get rid of newly hatched mites.

Lice on the other hand are a bit tricky to handle. They spend most of their life on the chicken therefore are not affected by cleaning or spraying. To control lice, you may need dust baths, dust powers or blue ointment.

To get rid of lice on the birds, use a good lice powder which can be made by mixing 3 parts of gasoline with one part of cresol and gradually stirring in plaster of Paris or building cement to take up the moisture.

After drying, this mixture is ready for applying to mature fowls. The mixture should be applied thoroughly.

Homemade Chicken Coop Plans

Looking for a good chicken coop plan? If you are, check out Bill Keene’s Building a Chicken Coop Plan manual. The guide comes with a complete blueprint with step by step instructions. Click on the link below for more information.

==> Click here to visit Building a Chicken Coop now!

There are some people that raise chicken in their backyard but the hens refuse to lay any eggs. Chicken that do not produce eggs most probably is due to poor housing facilities.

It does not take a lot to satisfy a bunch of hens. But the housing does need to be adequately sized, has good amount of ventilation and protect the birds from the weather.

It is not surprising to find some backyard chicken coops which are too small, inadequate ventilation while some are too open all together. If the walls of the chicken housing have cracks all over, it will permit strong draft to blow on the fowls.

Sometimes, it is not enough to improve on the existing chicken coop, you may need to build a new chicken house.

Choosing the right location

The first thing you may want to consider when building a new chicken house is choosing the perfect location for the coop. Ideally, the chicken house should be located on southern or eastern slope, near an orchard or wood lot so that the birds have plenty of shades.

A coop built on a southern or eastern slope allows snow to thaw more readily and the ground will dry up and warms much quicker.

Size of the chicken house

Choosing the size of the chicken coop depends large on the breed of the fowl and the amount of protection needed. As a rule of thumb, allow from three to five square feet of floor space for each hen.

If you have chicken which are heavy breed, you may need to allocate a larger space for them. Crowding of the birds may not yield good results. The hens may be unable to lay any eggs due to crowding stress.

Ventilation for the chicken coop

Actually, there is no best method to provided ventilation in a DIY chicken coop. Some people may choose using a simple curtain front while others will use an open front.

Open fronts does provide excellent ventilation but many people will go for the curtain front because it can be placed over most of the opening during bad weather.

Here’s a tip you can use when deciding on the right ventilation for a coop. It has been found that a chicken house closed on 3 sides and curtained tightly on the south do not provide enough fresh air for the birds occupying it.

Hence it is best to have a narrow opening along the south side of the house just under the rafters. This feature will allow greater circulation of air than the curtained openings alone.

DIY Chicken Coop

Looking for a good step by step chicken coop plans? If you are, check out Bill Keene’s Building a Chicken Coop guide. It has all the information you’ll need to build the perfect chicken coop with ample space and good ventilation. For more information, click on the link below.

==> Click here to visit Building a Chicken Coop now!

Here’s a website that most people would not know unless you are a woodworking enthusiast. It is John Metz’s Woodworking4Home site.

John Metz is a professional woodworker from Wisconsin and he has put together one of the largest collection of woodworking project plans and blueprints on the web. The members’ area has a whopping 14,000 plus project plans!

The last couple of days, I was trying to look for good chicken house building plan on the internet. By chance, I stumble upon the Woodworking4Home site.

I browse through the project categories and was quite pleased there is a section on DIY chicken house plans. I bought the pack and immediately downloaded the chicken coop plans.

Woodworking4Home Chicken Coop Plan Review

The plan that I downloaded is actually in pdf format. When I opened the file, there’s a diagram of the completed chicken house. The title written there “small chicken house”, but it looks kind of big to me.

The chicken house design is actually 8 x 8 feet and you can have 15 – 20 hens living in it. The blueprint then proceeds to explain the main function of the coop, which is to provide protection for the birds from the element, predators, injury and theft. I could not agree more.

The coop design has everything the chicken living in it would need such as ample space, perches, nests, feeder and waterer, light source and ventilation.

At the bottom of the plan, there is a diagram showing the cut away view of the chicken house with all the measurements and dimensions for the wood members.

All in all, the chicken house building plan from Woodworking4Home seems decent. However, if you really want to make the coop on your own, you need to have some woodworking and carpentry experience. Nonetheless, it gives you an idea on what’s involved in making your own DIY chicken coop for your backyard.

==> Click here to visit Woodworking4Home now!