Designing Your Chicken Coop: A Work in Progress

Five years ago, my husband and I designed and built our backyard chicken coop. The design was based on photos of a friend’s chicken coop and ideas we gleaned from other online coop designs. Both of us being mechanical engineers and hands-on do-it-yourselfers, designing our own chicken coop is a pretty straightforward task. If anything, we went way beyond what was needed by modeling it in CAD with very exacting dimensions and drawings. That first design incorporated all the necessities for keeping a small flock healthy and comfortable — coop area, run area, nesting boxes, perches, doors, accommodations for food and water.