We first built the floor, then attached the walls one by one. The most complicated piece of this was the back wall, where we were going to install nest boxes. We laid out the framing to see how it was all going to work and piece it together:
Here's what the back wall looked like once we got the framing for it attached to the floor:
See the hands in the picture above? What are they doing? Here is a closer look:
So we have the back wall and the wall with the people door. Here is what the front wall was shaping up to look like:
And finally, we have the remaining wall, which we just called "the other wall":
We actually put the front wall on last. Before we did that, we installed our nest boxes on the rear wall. Last year we redid our kitchen and our friend scored us a complete set of cabinets out of a kitchen he was working on. We used some of the cabinets for our kitchen, some for our laundry room, and we had a little piece left. We decided to use that for our nest boxes. Here's what they looked like once they were installed:
Next we installed the roost. We hadn't given a lot of thought to where the roost would go, and the only logical place to put it at this point involved it being partly over the nest boxes. We didn't want roosting chickens to poop in the nest boxes, so we had to cover them up a little more:
At this point it was time for Mr. Chicken (our stuffed chicken) to inspect the construction and make sure everything was up to code:
Once we had Mr. Chicken's approval, we raised the roof:
With the coop structurally complete, we added paint, trim, and moved it to the part of the yard where we wanted it to sit:
Next, we built the chicken run. This was all made from salvaged fence pieces and chicken-wire:
We spread a thick layer of wood chips on the floor.
And finally, here is a shot of the finished doors to the nest boxes, and of the nests all prepared:
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