If you’re planning to build a chook house the good news is that if you’re basically competent with a hammer and some nails it’s not hard to do. You do need a good chook house design to start with however, because just like building a house if you try to do it without a plan to work from it may not work out too well.

We covered in some other articles some of the things you need to consider in a good chook house design. You need to allow for nesting boxes, roosting perches and places for food and water that will not become fouled from chicken droppings.

The good news though is that a simple chicken house design is quite adequate. Your chook shed doesn’t need to be complicated, ours is just a simple wooden shed with some thought put into where to put the components.

We were taken by the design of the chook house in the video. Obviously this guy has put some thought into how he will design his chook house, and in our view it works very well. But you don’t need to get quite this complicated unless you want to.

However as we said, it doesn’t have to be complicated. A simple chook house design always works well.

So why not get started building your own chicken shed now. It’s quite easy to plan it yourself. Just remember a simple chook house design works fine.

There’s So Many Chook House Designs, But Simple Works Best is an article by : Chicken Houses Australia, for information about the best chook houses available.

We’ve talked at length about the benefits of keeping chickens. All of those wonderful free range eggs in the fridge, all the benefits of chicken fertiliser to the garden, how much the kids will love them and how interesting they are to have around the house.

So now you’re convinced. You’ve spent some time learning about chicken houses, you have sourced a good henhouse or built one yourself, you’ve fitted it out with roosts and nesting boxes and food and water and you’ve decided whether you’re going to allow your chickens to free range around the garden or range in their own chicken run.

You’re all ready to go. Now you need to get your first chickens, but where do you get them?

It’s much easier if you live in the country of course however even if you live in the city there are plenty of places where you can source chickens. And whether it’s the country or the city it’s always much harder to get good laying hens than it is to get roosters, in fact you can probably get a rooster or 10 for free.

It is entirely possible to buy day-old chicks. It is unlikely that you will get all females, and you will need to hand rear your chicks yourself. We have done that ourselves and it’s a lot of fun but it’s also quite a bit of work.

Or if you’re really serious about getting chicks you could even buy an incubator and hatch them yourself. There are companies which will send you an incubator together with fertile eggs and post all these to you so you don’t need to leave the house. We have also done that and I can tell you the kids take huge delight in watching the chicks hatch through the lid of the incubator.

Or else you can buy your hens as point of lay pullets, in other words hens that are almost ready to begin laying. Young hens begin to lay around 16 or 17 weeks.

If you get online you’ll find places where you can source all of these things. Alternatively try the Yellow Pages for some chicken clubs, called poultry clubs, give them a ring and they should be able to help out with some suggestions. And there are chickens shows where you can make some good contacts and learn much more about keeping chickens as well just by talking to the exhibitors.

If you make a little effort it is always possible to find somewhere to buy chicks or hens. Just decide at what point in the life cycle you would like to buy them.

Where Are Your Chickens Going to Come from? is an article by : Chicken Houses Australia, for information about the best chook houses available.

Unfortunately life for a chook can be a little dangerous. There are plenty of predators that are happy to eat a tasty chicken including foxes and wild and domestic dogs. And cats. And more.

So when you’re building or buying a chicken house how do you make it safe for your chooks?

There’s a few things to think about. The first is the height of the fence surrounding the chicken house, assuming that your chickens are allowed out of their house during the day to roam outdoors.

In our experience chooks can fly reasonably high. At a guess a chook can clear a fence that would be 5 feet high. Of course it depends on the individual chicken.

You can attempt to limit their ability to fly by clipping their wings however in our experience this is successful only occasionally. We have had chooks with 2 wings clipped that can still fly to some height.

Therefore if you are seeking to keep your chooks within the run all this day you should make the surrounding fence at least 6 feet high.

Having said that the fence around our chicken run is no higher than 3 feet, and we can step over it comfortably. Some of our chickens fly over each day and free range around the garden and although we live in the country and have plenty of foxes we have never lost a chook to a fox.

Provided you always ensure they are back in the chicken house at night. And you need to check, because they will return 99 percent of the time but 1 percent of the time they will not.

It’s also worth knowing that unless you protect the fence around the chicken run a fox will dig underneath it. Foxes will always dig rather than jump. Although as noted our fence would be no barrier to a fox who wanted to jump over it we have never had a fox in the chicken yard in more than 10 years of keeping chooks.

But you must protect your fence from digging foxes. You do this by digging about 6 inches of the chicken wire into the ground, folding it horizontally outwards from the base of the fence and covering it with soil so that once the fox starts to dig he will encounter chicken wire and be forced to stop.

If you have your chicken house standing alone, in other words with no surrounding fence, you must line the floor of the chicken house with chicken wire or foxes will dig under the walls to get into the house.

We have secondary protection which is an electric wire around the fence about 4 inches off the ground, and any digging fox will encounter that very quickly.

So when you’re thinking about designing your chicken house you need to think about how you will protect your chooks from predators like foxes. Foxes and dogs will be quick to catch your chooks unless you give them some good protection.

How to Make Your Chicken House Safe for Your Chooks is an article by : Chicken Houses Australia, for information about the best chook houses available.

If you’re building a chicken house for your chickens you need to make a few basic decisions before you start building. The first of these is how many chickens you plan to house and what size your chicken house should be.

Whilst it varies from situation to situation a rough rule of thumb is that chickens require around 4 square feet, or about 60 centimetres by 60 centimetres, space in the chicken house.

This is a minimum and of course more is always better. And this varies enormously depending on whether or not the chickens are able to exit the chicken house during the day.

If your chickens are housed only in the chicken house all day then it is important to have the absolute maximum amount of space available in the house. If you have built or purchased your house for your chickens already then start with a small number of chickens in relation to the size of the house and see how they cope.

We house our chickens in a shed that would be roughly 2 1/2 metres square. We have about 15 chickens and this is entirely adequate, however they also have a large run for daytime use and only enter the chicken house to sleep at night and to lay eggs, or if it’s raining.

The rest of the day they spend their time outside. This of course means that the chicken house need not offer them stacks of space, because they are not in it often.

It is also important to make sure your chicken house has ample ventilation. Chicken coops that have no ventilation can lead to sick chooks.

When I built our chicken coop I made sure that the top half of the door had chicken wire, and the top half of one wall, (on the eastern side so that rain rarely gets in), also had chicken wire. This allows breeze to get in and out, thereby ventilating the chicken house.

Good ventilation is important.

If you plan to house your chooks all day in a chicken coop with no run outside be prepared to spend a lot of time cleaning. The mess, particularly chicken droppings, will build up fast and will need to be cleaned very regularly.

We always strongly recommend that there be a run attached to the chicken house or that alternatively the chooks be allowed to free range in the garden during the day.

Chickens Need Space. How Big Should My Chicken House Be? is an article by : Chicken Houses Australia, for information about the best chook houses available.

Image via Wikipedia

If you’re looking for the ideal pet for the children, one that is both productive, easy to keep and cheap, consider chickens. A few chickens, a good chicken house and some enthusiastic children and you’ve got the perfect combination of happy children, cheap and easy pets and productivity.

Chickens are cheap to buy, cheap to feed and cheap to house. And, taken from my own experience, children absolutely love them.

We have somewhere around a dozen chickens. Some we raised ourselves so they cost us nothing, some we bought and some were given to us. If you take both the cost of the chicken house, which we made ourselves from scrap materials, as well as the cost of the birds, we got our entire flock and housing for well under $100.

And our children love them. They will happily pick them up and carry them around patting them, and would, if we allowed it, bring them into the house and turn them into house pets.

And all children should have a pet, it’s one of the rites of passage of being a child.

Of course you could buy them a dog, but dogs are quite expensive, both to buy and feed, and a big commitment as well. And what do you do with a dog when you go on holidays?

Or you could buy a cat, but a cat can also be quite expensive, and also a problem when you go on holidays.

In fact one of the biggest problems with having pets for the children is accommodating the pets when you’re not around. It can be seriously expensive to do so.

Chickens however are ideal. We can leave ours all alone for 2 weeks or more, with a large supply of food and water available, and they happily take care of themselves.

On top of all that chickens have one huge advantage over any other pet. They’re productive. I can’t think of another pet that produces a useful product for you, but chickens will do that. Every day you have a new supply of healthy, nutritious and tasty free range eggs for the family to feast on. What other pet does that?

So if you’re looking for the ideal pet for the children consider chickens. Buy a few chicks, build a chicken house and you’re well on your way to a cheap, simple and easy to care for pets of the children that is productive every single day.

You won’t regret it.

Why Are Chickens The Perfect Pet? is an article by : Chicken Houses Australia, for information about the best chook houses available.

Keeping chickens is a lot of fun, but there is some work involved as well. One of the jobs involved in keeping chickens is checking for parasites and eliminating them as best you can.

Lice and mites are just two of the parasites that you may find on your chickens, there’s more. Generally speaking you will find these little critters on the skin of your chooks with a good inspection.

Not only will it be unpleasant for your birds to have parasites on them, it can make them sick and reduce their ability to lay eggs.

Of course this is just like all other pets, just about any pet can attract unwanted bugs. Just try keeping fleas off your dog.

Roughly once a month you should inspect your chickens. Spread the wings and look through the feathers underneath the wings checking for red and irritated skin, little clumps of eggs or even lice themselves. The lice are big enough to see.

And after checking underneath the wings look under the breast feathers as well.

If discovered you should treat your birds with a proprietary powder. However it is not sufficient just to treat the birds, you should also treat their chicken house as well.

The way I do that is to use a flea bomb that I get from the supermarket. It is one of those things intended to be let off in the house in a closed room to get rid of fleas that may be living there from your cat or dog.

I put a sheet over the ventilation areas of the chicken house, close off the entrance so that the chickens cannot get in, let off the bomb in the morning and keep the house locked up all day. Works a treat.

This won’t kill all of the nasty bugs, but will kill many of them, and will keep their numbers down until next time.

Here’s a short video showing you how to inspect your chickens.

And here’s a little more reading.

Chickens and Parasites Go Together. How Do You Get Rid of the Bugs? is an article by : Chicken Houses Australia, for information about the best chook houses available.

We’ve spoken on our website before about keeping chickens as pets. Normally people would keep chickens because they are productive and useful to have around. But today we wanted to look specifically at how to make sure your chickens are a good pet, particularly for the children.

There’s no doubt children love pets. Ours adore their chickens along with our other pets. However there is nothing quite like having a pet that will sit on your lap and curl up at night with you to sleep on your lap.

Now you can’t really get chickens to do that can you?

Yes you can. It’s not easy and you can’t do it with all chickens but its perfectly possible to get chickens which are as good a pet as a rabbit or a guinea pig and which will happily sleep on your child’s lap in the evening.

Here’s how you do it.

You need to start with young chicks. Preferably day-old chicks. You will need to provide housing for them with warmth and feed, so you will need to research a little about raising chicks.

It’s not hard, we do it all the time, with a simple box in the laundry with a light bulb suspended above the chicks for warmth. You start with a 100 watt bulb for maximum warmth then gradually replace those lightbulbs with bulbs of a smaller wattage as the chicks get older.

That will not, of it’s own, produce chickens that will be the perfect pet for children. What you need to do is to spend time every day with the chick, treating it as your pet.

We did this very successfully with a silky bantam hen which we raised from hatching in an incubator which we borrowed. Every day from day one my 9-year-old daughter took that chick from its box, kept it on her lap whilst sitting on the couch and patted it.

Once it was older it was completely tame and would run up to her and stand on her shoes whenever it saw her. It was happy to be picked up and cuddled and if you sat down it would snuggle in your lap.
So remember as well as providing lots of tasty eggs you can also turn your chickens into the perfect pet to your children that will sleep on their lap just like a rabbit or a cat will.

You just have to take the time to train it as you would with any other animal.

How To Turn Your Chickens Into Pets is an article by : Chicken Houses Australia, for information about the best chook houses available.

Just like people chickens like to sleep at night. And just like people they have their favourite bed. Unlike people their bed allows them to sleep upright.

You see chickens sleep standing up. To do so they need to be able to stand on a perch, which is usually housed in the chicken house. Some people are unsure about why there are these horizontal bars in chook sheds, and that’s the explanation.

We’ve been asked how much space a chicken needs to roost on, and what size the perches should be.

Generally speaking your average backyard chook needs somewhere around 8 to 10 inches, say 200 to 250 centimetres, on which to roost. Ours have way more than this however if you look at them at night they are usually all snuggled up together, and one end of the perch is empty. So this distance of around 8 inches is ample.

If you have bantams for instance 5 or 6 inches is probably enough, but if you have some of the larger breeds including meat birds you would need to allow a little more.

What width perches are required? The chickens stand on the perch and so if it is a wide flat surface they cannot grip with their toes. Our perches would be slightly narrower than 2 inches wide, and our chooks seem quite happy with this.

It is important that the perch be lifted above the ground. It is not sufficient merely to lay rods on the ground. Chickens have probably have been bred, over many generations, from wild birds that would sleep in the branches of trees, and the instinct of perching above the ground is still strong. Chickens prefer to sleep above the ground, and although no one knows exactly how high, at least 12 to 18 inches would be the minimum at our guess.

It also important to remember that chickens will still poop whilst on their perch. So you’ll find that a pile of chicken droppings will build up directly underneath the perch. For this reason it is important to ensure that your perches are not placed directly above anything else such as food or water, otherwise these will become contaminated.

Once you have your chickens well housed in a good chicken house with nice solid stable perches for them to sleep on then why not get outside one night with a torch and have a look at them all sleeping in a row. It’s really quite fun to do and my children and I really enjoy looking at our sleeping chickens.

What’s The Function Of Perches In Your Chicken House? is an article by : Chicken Houses Australia, for information about the best chook houses available.

Here’s a good video showing you a great portable chicken house. It’s only suitable for a small number of chooks, it won’t work for dozens of chooks, but a small chicken house like this one is fine for 2 or 3 chooks.

The beauty of this type of chicken house is that you can move it around from time to time. Chooks scratch around, and so if you leave your hen house on the same patch of grass all the time it won’t do the grass any good at all.

So move it around every few days and it won’t harm the grass, in fact it will benefit it from all the droppings left behind.

Of course you can always allow your chooks to free range in the garden during the day, just don’t forget to put them back in the hen house at night, and close the door.

There’s foxes everywhere.

Hope you enjoyed the video.

Portable Chicken Houses Allow You To Keep Chooks In The Garden is an article by : Chicken Houses Australia, for information about the best chook houses available.

I just love chooks, and had to put up this video about an automatic opening door on the chook house.

If you’ve got a chicken house with that many chooks why not have an automatic door?

Aren’t those gorgeous chooks?

Chicken House With An Automatic Door is an article by : Chicken Houses Australia, for information about the best chook houses available.