The Chickens Get A Mansion!

A tour of the hen house…

The hen house has a storage area that’s a closed room, as well as a run.

Entering the outside door into the coop area, I’ve got a storage area.

The storage area has a couple of shelves.

That’s where I keep all my extra treats and waters and feeders

Everything that I use out here on a daily basis.

On the wall I’ve got two control boxes. ⏲

One controls the lights so I can have lights come on, on a timer.

And the other one controls the two barn fans.

I’ve got a fan in the coop, and a fan out in the run.

On one end of the storage room is the grow out pen. 

It doubles as a broody breaker.

The divider wall is held on with latches so I can open it up and make one big huge pen.

Or I can put it the wall in place to use the broody breaker

So what is a broody breaker anyway?

When a hen goes “broody” it means she wants to incubate eggs 

She will stay broody for three weeks (incubation is around 21 days)

And if you’re not going to give her eggs to hatch or babies to care for,

It’s not so healthy for her to be broody because …

 they don’t eat as much and

 they don’t drink as much

because they think they’re sitting on a clutch of eggs 

Being broody is actually almost like having a fever ? … their belly gets really warm because eggs have to be a certain temperature to form into baby chicks.

So the best way to break it is to put them on a wire floor with air flowing underneath to dissipate the heat and not allow it to collect under her.

The quicker you can dissipate the heat, then the quicker they’ll come out of being broody.

As the chickens are aging from juveniles to adults, I try to give them everything in the grow out pen that they’re gonna have out in the big pen so they understand how to use it. They’ll stay in the grow out pen until they’re about the same size as the adult flock. Then I’ll introduce them to the flock.

My egg collection box is halfway between the storage room and the roosting area.

It’s a rollaway design, so the eggs roll to the back (in the storage area).

Inside the egg box we have egg mats that we nailed in to the walls so that the eggs won’t break as they roll back into the catch area.

I don’t have dividers in these egg boxes because the hens were fighting too much trying to share the same box.

So I took care of that by not having dividers. It’s just one super large box the size of four egg boxes, just no divider walls.

And because of the height of the top egg box, we gave them a ladder, to be able to get up there

These are the roost bars where they sleep.

They’ve got a big ole ladder to get to the top where there are four bars.

This is enough room to hold about 30 hens.

And they’ve got their little door to get outside because unless it’s a nice day, I don’t keep the big door to the run open.

The reason that I’ve got big huge double doors on both ends of the roosting is when we need to replace the sand floor or add more sand out in the run I wanted to be able to drive the tractor from outside, through the roost area, and into the run. I didn’t want to manually wheelbarrow little bits in at a time. To enable the tractor to ride through, the roost bar is on hinges so we can pull the ladder off and fold the entire bar setup against the wall, out of the way.

(This is an old photo before construction was completed but it’s the best way to show it)

I don’t have to worry about the hens getting out when we open the building up, because the hooks on the support beams is what that orange landscape fencing is for. I can hook it up all the way across the middle row of support beams, and around the corner to the outside wall so that we can put all the hens on the other side if we need to open the doors and let the tractor come in. I don’t really recommend letting them free range because we have coyotes here.

We built a jungle gym for the hens out of scrap wood from building the hen house.  

We buried some logs standing up in end for them to perch on

We made a balance beam type thing

And we got an old tire. it’s got some finer sand, some wood ash, things that are good for them to dust bathe in, so that’s their dust bathing spot.

They have 3 20lb treadle feeders … 2 out in the run and 1 in the coop. By keeping all 3 full, it allows me to manage their feed once a week.

I hung an extra egg collection basket on one of the beams in the middle of the run … it’s about 18 inches off the ground. This is where I put their fresh vegetables that they get as a treat 3 times a week. I just drop the vegetables in the basket and they pull out what they want. I don’t worry about they picking through the basket, dropping what they don’t want on the ground because it let’s the hens on the lower end of the pecking order to get to the scraps and feed away from the more controlling hens.

They have 2 watering systems  … one in the coop and the other in the run … that are hooked up to the house water. This way I know they always have water even when we leave the house to go to town.

In the summer I give them ice blocks I make and frozen watermelon.  For this I created 2 stands out of huge flower pots with a ceramic saucer on top. There are landscape pavers sitting in the ceramic dishes because the stone and ceramic will hold the cold temperature longer. So I put the ice and frozen watermelon on those pavers and the tray holds anything that melts.

I started out with the ceramic saucers on the ground but then decided to elevate them onto a flower pot to keep the hens from kicking the sand into the treats.