The Blue House Coop

Here are my plans. The grid represents 1 foot by 1 foot. The coop is 5'x7', walk-in lean-to style slanting down from about 8' to 7' tall (tall enough to allow for thick bedding and enough head room for my tall husband to walk into). The human door and chicken door are elevated off the floor by quite a bit, to keep the bedding from falling out when the doors are open. I planned on large vents all around the whole perimeter under the roof. I also included a "poop door" in the plans - a floor-level opening where I'd push the bedding out for the big clean-out.





Here's the location - under some big trees for shade:



And the outline of what it should look like:



It's an odd shape because there's a young linden tree in the way, right next to where the coop would be. I planted that tree before I had decided on chickens... I didn't want to move it, so I decided to build around it. And the reason for the diagonal wall is that if I extended that side all the way to the left to make the run a standard shape, there wouldn't be enough room for me to maneuver to and from the coop with a wheelbarrow. It would be too close to the raised garden (left) and the shrubbery. The angled cut into the run would give me more space.

Note: You may notice how close everything is to the property lines there (1 foot), with the retaining wall on one side and chain link fence on the other side. This is an ongoing dispute with the town. One authority says that coops are not regulated, another says that the coop is an accessory structure and needs to be 8 feet from the line... Multiple authority figures have told me the run is fine wherever, but one official said it's not... The property on the other side of the chain link fence changed owners in the middle of construction and the new people are waging war on me right now. There's an appeals process happening at the moment. The town's rules are unclear and different officials are giving people conflicting information. I'm hoping they don't make me move anything... But let this be a warning to anybody building in a densely packed neighborhood and putting anything near your fences: double-triple-quadruple check with all your authorities beforehand, and maybe get their permission in writing in case they later say "well he shouldn't have told you that"