Finding The Best Chicken Coop Plans

There are many offers of chicken coop plans on the internet, but which of these will result in a good-quality working chicken house? If you know all about chickens and how to design happy and healthy housing for them, are good at preplanning, making your own blueprints from basic plans or sketches, generating a detailed list of materials before starting to assemble your chicken coop, as well as being an experienced woodworker, then you will probably get by with any type of chicken coop plans you come across.

Or you might discover how much time and money you have wasted, and you could actually design and build a hen house that might be dangerous or unhealthy for your birds. Careful, accurate planning and proper blueprints are essential to building a good chicken coop.

As a minimum you should include the following in your planning:

• Selecting a suitable site for the hen house in your backyard or garden

• Calculating the correct size of chicken house for the number of hens

• Ensuring there is adequate ventilation and lighting in the coop

• Selecting the nesting box and feeder arrangements

• Ensuring adequate protection from predators

• Considering the need for electrical or water supplies to the chicken coop

In practice most people will need some help from chicken experts to do this planning completely, and will rely on good blueprints rather than sketches and vague layout drawings to make a proper hen house. Without good blueprints it is quite likely that you will not achieve a good functional chicken coop, it might not be sufficiently strong and it might let predators in.

If you adopt a trial-and-error approach you will certainly cost yourself in wasted materials and effort, your enthusiasm will take a dive and – maybe the most important – you will not get the enjoyment and satisfaction you should be getting. In addition, unhappy or unhealthy hens are poor layers, so you will not get the dozens of free-range eggs you had expected.

Before starting to make the chicken coop you will need to prepare a comprehensive list of materials needed for the job. This is vital, otherwise you will come up against inevitable problems during the build when you find you have missed some bracket or other and your local hardware store has closed for the day! It is quite difficult to make a complete materials list, and we feel that it would be much easier and safer to let a chicken coop expert do it on your behalf.

Without such an expert to guide you, it is very easy to make mistakes during assembly. Often these will not become obvious until the end of the project, and by then it could be too late to rectify any problems. It is certainly sensible to invest in good-quality chicken coop plans, and usually these come complete with clear step-by-step instructions and schematic diagrams. In our experience we have found that good plans and instructions actually save the builder money overall because he does the job properly in the first place.

We have found and strongly recommend a very experienced chicken expert, Bill Keene. Bill has put together, in our oopinion, the best chicken coop plans, including the essential blueprints, step-by-step instructions, materials required and expert tips and guidance for you to plan and build a chicken coop that will fit your particular requirements perfectly. He will help you avoid all those common errors made by beginners, and also show you how to make a happy, safe and healthy living area for your birds.  In our opinion, Bill is the best source for hen house designs.

We hope you really enjoy making your chicken coop, and wish you lots of luck!