Our Urban Chicken Quest: TOUR OUR CHICKEN COOP (Part 1)

Are you as anxious to read this post as I am to share it?! Welcoming chickens to our little homestead in the city has been a long time coming, and building a coop and run for them was one big step in the process. Today I want to share a {photo heavy} post with you that outlines the building process for our coop. 

Bur first, the World's Most Handsome Dog, my brother's furry friend, Eddy: 

Anyway, back to the chickens. Here's what the coop looked like before:

The first step was to gut the few remaining materials on the inside. While Ryan and I did that, my dad began cutting plastic paneling that we are repurposing from an abandoned hog house:

The chicken coop is wired, and we're keeping this light (with a light switch):

And this vent:

Next, we {as in Ryan and Dad} used a saws-all to cut two 12x12x12 squares in the wall for exterior nesting boxes:

To this day I wish I paid more attention in math class to figure out angles and measurements. This is one area where I have the largest deficiency. That, and operating power tools with blades.

Framing in the nesting boxes was the next step in turning this Hamm radio shack into a chicken coop:

The wood we used for framing was from shelves that held electronics located inside the Hamm radio shack:

And the plywood was an old sheet my dad had lying in the shop:

The lid for the nesting box was a shelf from inside the shack, and the shingles were from several leftover boxes at our house: 

While Ryan and I were fitting and shingling the lid, my dad continued cutting from this piece of leftover foam insulation {also found in a scrap pile at the farm}:

This piece of insulation, cut carefully to ensure no waste, covered the entire inside of the coop and nesting boxes. After insulating the entire coop, we used that plastic paneling from an old hog house to line the floor and inside of the coop:

Again, careful measuring and cutting to ensure no waste allowed us to repurpose the panels perfectly for the chicken coop: 

This coop will be nicely insulated for our cold Iowa winters, thanks to a regular styrofoam layer and a blue styrofoam insulation layer:

A few days after working on the coop, my parents hauled the structure from their shop to our backyard. After leveling it out, John started working on a run, and we added a few additional touches, like adding a window in the back, caulking the cracks to make it less drafty, adding corner trim to the nesting boxes, and more.

Want to see what the finished coop looks like? You'll have to come back next week for the big reveal!

In the meantime, if you want to see MORE photos of the construction process, head over to our Facebook page and click on the Chicken Coop Construction album!

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