Not all hen house plans are created equal, believe me I have a drawer full of plans I have never used. You want planes that are easy to follow and can be built with common readily available materials. You want to be able to purchase everything you need at your local hardware or home supply store.
Hen houses can be very simple or they can be multi-story hen house cities. Most of all you want your hens to be comfortable and happy. You will want some sort of heating device in cold weather. You will also want to use materials that are lasting and will withstand any type of weather. After all you do not want to build one of these every year.
In general you will want to have at least 2 square feet of space per hen. You'll also want to build nesting boxes inside your hen house. What about insulation and lady to keep your hens of the dark in long winter months ahead. Happy healthy hens will produce more eggs. If you have never had a Farm fresh egg before let me tell you you're really missing out. They are nothing like store-bought eggs.
Not only will your arm fresh eggs be better tasting than a will be organic and better for you. Another bonus is you will have a very good supply of fertilizer you can use in your garden or yard. Here are some other great tips you can use when deciding on which hen house plans would be right for you.
Build Your hen house for Easy Maintenance
When building your hen house who want to take into consideration how easy it is to maintain. Some people do not build their hen houses with ease of maintenance in mind, and suffer the consequences later on. But you can learn from there mistakes, and ensure that your hen house will be easy to clean in the future. One very important feature is to make sure the floor of the hen house is sloped downward toward the main door. When you wash the inside of the hen house, the water will automatically drain outside, instead of puddling in the middle.
Make sure you have Enough Space
Do not skimp on the size of your hen house. Chickens that live in undersized coops resort to abnormal pecking and even cannibalism. You do not want this! As a rule of thumb, you should allocate about 2 - 4 square feet per chicken. So if you have a coop holding 10 chickens, 40 square feet will be ample room for your happy hens to grow, feed, and produce.
Guarding Your hen house From Weather and Predators
It is important that you build your hen house with protection in mind. Both weather and predators can wreak havoc on your coop, so build it with these tips in mind.
Build the hen house on a high area with ample drainage and locate it facing the sun. In the event that it rains, this location will not only ensure that the coop does not get flooded, but that it dries quickly when the sun comes out.
Build your doors with proper strength mesh wire. Believe it or not, this step is one of the most common mistakes people make when building their coop. Without the proper strength, your mesh wire wil succumb to even the smallest of predators, allowing them easy access to your chickens.
So you can see there are quite a few different things to consider when deciding on which hen house plans to use. Using a set of free plans or an outdated set of hen house plans from your local library is not going to do the trick in my opinion. The plans I purchased were well worth the investment and made my building process so much easier. The result was a very professional looking hen house a fraction of the cost of what it would've cost me to buy one premade one or have one built.
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