Building A New Chicken Coop From Salvaged Materials

Spring is here and it is time for my girls to make the big move to Our Manor. This means that we needed to build another chicken coop for them to live in. This would be a temporary structure because we plan on building another coop later in our renovation project. Coops can be expensive and we are on a strict budget. In this post, I’ll show you how we built the new coop using salvaged materials.

Our new temporary coop! We will update the landscaping later.

My Sweet Ladies

I love my chickens . They have so much personality and are the sweetest pets! Honestly before I had a flock of my own, I never knew you could truly bond with a chicken. They are very intelligent creatures and did you know that they can remember up to 100 different faces? Fascinating! They don’t just lay eggs and peck at the ground all day, they communicate, snuggle, and play.

My journey as a chicken mama began May of 2020. I ordered 15 chicks off of a website one of my friends recommended and waited until the day they would be shipped to me. Not really sure of what I was doing, I was very nervous yet excited! When they arrived, I went to the post office and upon entering the building, I could hear them chirping! I picked up the tiniest little white box with holes in it and took them home with me. Inside fit all 15 beautiful girls!!

Being huge Downton Abbey fans, we decided to name them after the characters on the show. All except for one, sweet little “Sunshine” who only made it a day and then left us. She tried so hard and it was heartbreaking to lose her when we did everything we could to save her. That is just a part of farming. We buried her under my mom’s beautiful dogwood tree.

Over the last few years I have lost a few more…Sybil, Lady Rosamund, Mrs. Patmore, Mrs. Hughes, Phyllis, and Lavinia. It is sad to lose them because I had grown to love them as my pets. Now we are down to 8. We have Anna, Cora, Mary, Rose, Daisy, Edith, Isobel, and the infamous Lady Grantham.

Big Life Changes Equals A Big Move For the Girls

When I decided to move back to the Midwest from Dallas, I moved into my mom’s house (my childhood home) until the Manor was completed and I would eventually move. As you can expect, life threw a lot of curves that has extended this project significantly. Covid was an interesting experience with the lockdowns but this only meant that I had more time to focus on building the coop for my new flock.

I built the coop from the ground up by myself. It was the biggest project I had done on my own and although NOT perfect, I was very proud. The girls never complained and seemed to have a very peaceful and happy life out at the farm. We would visit them often throughout the day, feed them treats, collect eggs, and let them free range for a few hours in the late afternoon/early evening after the big predator birds would go to bed.

Love and An Unexpected Tragedy

I won’t go into great detail yet about how I met the man of my prayers but it really does happen when you are not expecting it. It was December of 2021 that I was introduced to my sweet Jason through a family member. We instantly connected and it grew quickly into a beautiful start of what has been the greatest relationship I have ever had. God sent him to me at the perfect time. He knew I was going to need Jason to help me get through the next couple of years of my life.

That Summer of 2022, tragedy struck in my life. My mom, Connie, who you will see a lot in these renovation posts, got diagnosed for the third time with breast cancer. It was Triple Negative, which is the deadliest form you can get. It had metastasized to her lungs, liver, and her brain. She was taken from us exactly three months from the day she was diagnosed. My siblings and I had the daunting task of handling her estate. This of course took time and we finally sold the property earlier this month.

She was my best friend. Losing her was the hardest thing I have ever experienced.

Time to Move The Girls to The Manor!

Because of the upcoming sale, we knew we were going to have to move fast on building the girls a new coop down at the Manor. Money was tight so we opted to use mostly salvaged materials. I took the hardware cloth, screws, and washers from the previous coop, an old calf hutch, some barn tin, and we salvaged some old 2×4 studs from upstairs. We went to Lowe’s and only ended up having to purchase a couple of drill bits, some plywood, a vinyl floor remnant, some screws, and a new circular saw blade.

Eventually we will be building a new deck and the chicken coop will be built in under the stairs. This coop would be a temporary housing until we can build their permanent structure. I wanted it to be pretty but it did not need to be perfect.

Together we worked several hours on many different days to put this together for them. We worked in sunny weather, the rain, snow, wind, and even in the dark! We were on a major time crunch and we finished at around 10:30pm the night before closing.

The girls have seem to be pretty happy since the move. They get friendly visitors every day and plenty of leaves to scratch through and yummy snacks! I admit, it feels really good to have them down there with us when we are working on the Manor. I know my mama would have really loved seeing them there!

Lady Grantham in her new nesting basket ❤

I used the ramp we made for them in the last coop and my mom once made them a wreath for the door. All of the boxwood clippings had blown out of it so it is just the form, but I will use it to create them another beautiful wreath. I am also thinking about adding a bird feeder, and maybe a flag on the outside. Before we sold the house, I took several of my mama’s plants from her gardens and planted them around the coop. A part of her is there with us and I can feel her love all around. The Manor was her dream too and her favorite place to be. She would have loved to see this.

It is not perfect, but it is ours. There is so much joy in the backyard now and I am very happy with how it turned out!