DIY Chicken Coop and Run: a 4×6 ft Coop Built for a School

The story behind this build

A team of first-year engineering students built this coop for a Montessori school next to the sand dunes near Arcata, California, as part of an introductory design course. The school wanted to keep chickens so the children could learn to look after animals.

The team set clear rules for the design before they started: it had to be safe for children, protect the birds from weather and predators, survive the coastal climate, be possible to move, be easy to clean and stay within a budget of $400 (donations kept the actual spending under that). They spent about 300 hours in total on design, meetings and building.

How it is designed

• The coop is a simple box, 4 × 6 ft and 4 ft high, framed with 2×2 lumber. Walls and floor are outdoor-grade plywood sheets.
• It stands on four concrete blocks, one at each corner, which keeps the floor off the damp ground.
• Two closable vents, 6 × 12 in, sit high up at the top corners of the side walls.
• The chickens go in and out through a 1 × 2 ft door in the front.
• Three nest boxes on each side open from the outside through doors hinged at the top. One locking bar across each row of doors secures all three at once, instead of a lock on every door.
• Two roosting bars at different heights sit in U-shaped holders, so they lift out for cleaning.
• The whole back wall is a lockable hinged door, which makes cleaning out the coop easy.
• The gable roof is about a foot tall, built from the same panels and covered with roofing paper and corrugated metal.
• The run is 5 × 10 ft and 4 ft high, framed with 2×2s and wrapped in chicken wire with 1 in openings. The wire continues a foot below ground so predators cannot dig under it, and a 6 in flap of wire is screwed down over the coop to close the gap between run and coop. People get in through an 18 in × 5 ft door.