Has anyone built a chicken house?

[CaptainWarbeck]

We want to get chickens, only 2 or 3, as I grew up with them and DS (age 2) is obsessed. I don't have cash to splash out on the beautiful houses you just buy outright, and I vaguely remember my parents knocking up a house from old furniture and some plastic boxes.

We're planning to do a run from fence posts and chicken wire as there's quite a bit of space, so it's really just the house itself for them to roost and lay eggs in that we need to somehow construct.

Any tips to help us try and put one together ourselves? Useful features you have in yours? Or is this a rubbish idea and we should just save up and buy one?

i built my first one from some pallets, like a toblerone - was a pain cleaning it out!

i also coveted the lovely but very expensive plastic chicken coops but have just bought a doubled walled plastic shed from argos for £150 - its only 3x4 but should be plenty big enough for my 3 chickens and a breeze to clean/wash out with the dreaded red mite in mind!

My dad made a house for our ducks. It wasn't like a chicken coop with a nest box or anything (they didn't need roost bars either with their webbed feet) but more like a glorified dog kennel with a door. They only stayed in there at night and had the run of the garden the rest of the time. It wasn't fancy but it did them ok for 15 years. We also had a rabbit hutch made out of an old sideboard, with one of the doors replaced with an old oven shelf!

Maybe try and find something that you could adapt? Some furniture from free-ads perhaps? As long as it's raised off the ground and waterproof with some decent ventilation then I don't see how you can go far wrong. As Lookingforbaubles said, it'll probably be that keeping it clean will be a little less convenient as the coops are generally designed for access but it depends how handy you are with the tools!

We made one, it is five years old now.

Probably cost £130-150 in materials, I think we might have had the roofing left over from something else.

We drew a plan/made it together. We added an axle and some wheels because we like to move it around in the winter, that was probably another £30.

Needs painting this year.

Just taken in the evening sun. It took us a few hours of joint effort - plus wheel time.