I´m going to tell you how I built a low budget henhouse, our first one at Hiddenstreet, out of an old tv cabinet. With it comes the storie of how we became (or how my husband became) a city chicken farmer :)
It has always been my husbands dream to have chickens. But I always said no to it as I thought it would be such a restriction if we wanted to travel. We had two cats and a dog and it was always a puzzle to get someone to take care of them while we went abroad. We could take the dog with us when traveling around the country but we always had to get someone to look after the cats while we went somewhere.
I thought it would be very hard to get someone to visit chickens as well twice a day on top of it. As there is a public walking path beside our garden I was also worried that everyone passing would be "spying" on our household if we had chickens in the garden. We live in the city and very few people in our town have chickens.
My husband had asked the neighbors how they felt about it and everyone was all right with the idea. We also have a 1000 square meeter garden so there was no lack of space but still I was the boring one to say no.
After my husbands big birthday few years back I started to feel really bad about not giving him my permission to hold chickens so I told him he could build a hen house. He already had a very nice shed in the garden that he inherited after his father. The shed was moved with a trunk from Akureyri in the north of Iceland to the city where it was pulled with a crane into our garden. But even having this nice shed he was not planning on having chickens in that one. Just the mowing machine and some tools. He wanted to build another shed for chickens. But my husband is a man of many words but not always so much a man of action when it comes to carpentry ;)
In the spring of 2012 he started to tear apart some Euro pallets to build a hen house in the garden. It was actually the same time me and the kids were planning the same. My idea was a little bit different though.
We went to the local drift store and bought an old TV cabinet. It was a funny ride as I put the seats down in my Subaru Legacy and my son sat in the front and my daughter sat on the floor of the car in front of him while we wrapped the trunk down with a rope around the cabinet. Then we took it to my brothers workshop where we started to change it.
At the same time my husband talked a lot about his plans with chickens so I could ask him if he wanted eggs to hatch in an egg machine or if he wanted to get young chickens ready to lay eggs. And I managed to pull out of him all kinds of info. He wanted young chickens but no eggs. I still cant believe he was clueless of what we were doing but he says he was. (He is a nice guy so maybe he just wants the story to sound better that way) ;)
So while he was taking a pause from the computer work tearing pallets apart and almost giving up on this, me and the kids were building some extra space in the back of the tv cabinet.
I was planning on giving him 3 chickens so I wanted to make 3 rooms or boxes for them to make their nests and laying eggs in. I made the nest boxes out of thick plywood and the roof of it had hinges so you could fetch the eggs from the outside.
Then I had to make an opening on the side for them to get in and out and I made a system for shutting it down with a plate that you could move up and down with a rope. Then you could fasten the rope to keep it open. After that we started to cover it with roof cardboard under the final boarding but the drawers would be functional for keeping the corn and stuff in it.
I really wanted to have a life chicken on the kitchen table when he woke up on his birthday but at the same time I wanted him to pick the chickens out him self. I discussed it with a good friend of mine that has chickens (in Hólmavík in the north) and she was very exited about this and was ready to drive to the city (for 3 hours) with a chicken in a cat cage. One that I could borrow for his birthday just for the fun of it. But in the end I decided to go to a chicken farmer I knew in Mosfellsdalur (just out of Reykjavik) and buy 3 young chickens.
We had planned this very thoroughly. We were going to fetch the chickens the day before his birthday and keep them in the garage over night in a big dog cage. The next morning I was going to put one of them on the kitchen table for a surprise. My daughter had even drawn a picture of how and when everything was going to happen.
The Chicken cabinet was not completed as I needed more pallet wood to board it with on the outside but I had boarded the doors on the front, the back and the sides as well as the drawers in the front. I also needed some piece of corrugated iron to use as roof but we had that at home. And so I wouldn´t take all the fun of building the hen house from my husband (or so I thought) I decided to give it to him with a little finishing left.
My husband works at home so it was impossible to move the henhouse without him seeing it so we decided to start with bringing the chickens home and fetch the house the next day.
But all our plans fell apart that day as a small rabbit was given to my son at the chicken farm. Well my son took it in his hands and could´t return it back overwhelmed by it´s cuteness so he got to keep it. We came home with 3 chickens and a rabbit trying to find a plausible story of how we got this rabbit. And as none of us are good liars we just put the cage with the chickens upon the garden table and called the birthday boy to get his premature birthday present.
He was very surprised and extremely happy with his present and stunned when we went to fetch the hen house cabinet the next day. We could put it with the side down in the Subaru legacy again and then we had to carry it through the hills in our garden where he wanted it to be located (beside his bigger garden shed). I think he was very relieved not having to take apart more pallets. Instead he started to build a fence around the small hen house.
The chickens were very happy with the cabinet house but we had picked 3 chicks that were all very different. One morning the black one started to crow. Cock a doodle doo! So the rooster was returned. Later that summer the Chickens got their freedom from the fence.
When winter came my husband decided to let the chickens live in the big shed and have it heated. But still one of them liked better to lay her eggs in the tv cabinet and now we call it the summer henhouse.
Later we fenced all the 1000 square feet garden so now they can go around the garden every day.
In the spring of 2013 one of the chickens started to lay on her eggs so we got fertilized eggs and switched. We got 6 life chickens out of it, gave 3 to our friends and kept two. One of them was a rooster. As we are not allowed to keep a rooster in the city I had to deal with that one. My brother holds chickens as well and he had to slaughter a rooster so we the siblings had a quality time one evening where he taught me how to slaughter a rooster ;)
I know :o It sounds nasty and it´s not very easy task to do but necessary if you are going to be a chicken farmer.
Until this day the tv cabinet house is still in use once in a while for example now when we are adjusting new chickens and want to keep them divided from the others.
But most of the time they live in their cozy heated house.
So don´t hesitate making a simple henhouse out of some old cabinet, some plywood and pallets. Our leftover of pallets are also still used as garden benches. And chickens are the gratest birthday presents of them all. I got one for my birthday last weekend ;)
Sleep tight!
M.