New Woods Open Air Coop

My new coop isn't finished yet, but it's finally at a point where I moved chickens in today, and where I'm comfortable sharing pictures.  I still have to put on the siding boards, build stairs for me and a ramp for the chickens, caulk a few joints, finish the edges of the rubber roof, and so on, but the chicken roosting area is airtight and draft free.  Today was pretty cold, 30 F, and very windy, and the coop is performing exactly as I hoped it would.  You can stand in the roosting area and you feel no air movement at all.  We had sun very briefly today and as soon as it hit the windows, the coop started to warm up immediately.  You can see in the pictures that the coop has very good light.  I may still put a coat of white paint on the walls to brighten it up more, but the wood shavings are light and the coop didn't seem dark or dingy at all.

I used a lot of found and recycled materials on the coop that you can see if you look closely.  You may also see errors :)  This is the first build I have done of this size or complexity.  The building is 8'x16'.  It wasn't terribly hard but there are things I will change on the next one.  Much of the framing was done with free, rough cut lumber.  The roofing rubber is all reclaimed rubber from a roof torn off a large commercial building.  The human door is an old school door.  One window was from a house build.  The builders cracked the molding on the $600 window, so I saved it from the dumpster.  The other taller window came from the owner of a house that burned down.  The white faced OSB I got for $5 a sheet from a neighbor that was tired of looking at it in his shed.  You can see how dirty it was by the top sheet that I couldn't reach to clean without a ladder so I didn't get to that piece yet.  The siding boards, most of which aren't on yet, I bought for $3 a board.  They are a mix of oak, cherry, birch, maple, and maybe a couple other kinds.  Some were so warped I can't use them for anything.  Those will be in my wood stove this winter.  Others, like some of the cherry, are 12" wide and 10' long and would easily cost $50 or more a board if I bought them at the store.  The monitor windows came from the dump a few weeks ago.  I got seven of them.  I wanted to put three in, but only two would fit.  They still let in a lot of light and I'm very happy with them.    

Anyway, here it is, in all it's unfinished glory.  Winter is upon us here in WI so progress may be pretty slow from here on out.  Next weekend is supposed to be warm so I'll get all the caulking and the chicken ramp done then, and hopefully some of the siding will be put up.

Nice work! That's a pretty posh chicken hotel. Skylights and everything!