The Seaside Mansion.

Chickens~ the gateway drug to farming.

We are subtropical.  That means it's not that it never gets cold here but that what we mean by cold & what someone in , say Alaska, means by cold are not the same thing @ all.  Weather is something to consider when building a chicken coop. 

 For all sorts of reasons our new coop had to be slap bang in the middle of our garden & entertainment area so there were certain considerations because of that.  It couldn't look like your average Aussie chicken shed of crate palings, chicken wire & corrugated iron. No.  Just, no. OK?

Anyway, in all honesty I know very little about chickens.  They lay eggs.  I eat eggs.  So I joined a forum & I read a lot of stuff about chickens & coops & if we didn't already have 4 girls laying up a storm I might have seriously reconsidered chicken adventuring because so many things can go wrong with chickens & all of it is completely gross! However chickens we had & I knew the coop we had wasn't adequate for the 4 girls we had, let alone the 8 extra I was intent on acquiring so I started looking ~ & I do mean looking.  I am a visual learner.  I looked @ pictures of coops.  If I liked how it looked I read about it. It will sound mad unless you too are a very visual learner.

I saw lots & lots of very lovely coops.  Some people are just incredibly imaginative & artistic but the bottom line is chickens still have to live in the thing & what was best for the chickens?  I kept returning to the concept of a Wood's Coop Design.  

To be quite frank the science of a Wood's design escapes me entirely but I understood the concept.  We didn't have enough space for a 12 X 8 coop but that was the basic idea we began working with. What we ended up with is a 4.8 square open to the nor'east, roosts along the back wall, nesting boxes out the back & because The Man & I are both gardeners first & foremost a lot of garden around it. We do have doors to hang for extreme weather conditions but so far we haven't needed them, even in wind & rain.  The air in the coop isn't moving so my girls are staying warm & dry while still getting plenty of fresh air.  I should also point out the only predators we have are hawks.

 Needless to say having arranged to meet my supplier & choose birds the weather became unco~operative & we were scrambling to finish the coop in time for the arrival of new birds. On a whim, because a neighbour had sandbags he was trying to offload, I added a sandpit under the coop.  It has been very popular!  As have the 3 large stumps stationed to get the best of the view & sea breezes.  Yes, I know... My husband refers to this as The Seaside Mansion for Spoilt Chooks.