Free Chicken Coop Plans

Leigh Anne from Tennessee put this plan up showing how her family built a 4x8 Chicken Coop for their 8 Plymouth Barred Rocks. The total area for the Project is 8x12 feet including the enclosed chicken yard. She has over 35 photos showing the steps of their construction with useful commentary along the way. There is not a drawn plan or material list with this one so it will take a lot of ad-libbing on your part.

More on Small Chicken Coop Design  PDF

More on Medium Chicken Coop Design  PDF

More on Build Chicken Coop Article   TheReadyStore.com

Ana White's A-Frame Chicken House can be built for less than $100. This coop can be moved around. Ram and Ana built this in a few hours and currently have 4 chickens in it. The plan has good illustrations and six step by step instructions.

TractorSupply.com gives you 7 ways to build your chicken coop. For each design they have a PDF with an illustration and detailed materials list. Then they give step by step instructions with detailed construction photos with each step. They have a mobile coop, a chicken tractor, a little barn house, a chicken condo and several more. Scroll to the bottom of their page and click on Build It! to go to the plan you want.

More on Chicken Condo Multilevel Coop

More on Little Big Barn for 14 or so Birds

More on Mobile Gypsy Wagon Coop

This Hen House from Purina Mills can hold up to 8 full size chickens. They give you general building guidelines, materials list and most importantly detailed illustrations of the floor framing, the roof framing, with front and side diagrams of the coop. I have a link below to the actual Plan.

More on Purina Mills Chicken Coop Plan  PDF

Here is a Movable Pasture Chicken Shelter. It has wheels on the back and you can lift the front and move it around your pasture. There is a lot of good information on this site too. See the article below titled Designing a Pasture Shelter. This plan has a component list, with a thorough explanation of the materials. Then he discusses cutting, framing, roofing, and finally putting on the wheels. There are detailed construction photos with the instructions. Also see the About.com Article below for how they built this plan.

More on About.com Built this Project See Their Article

More on Designing a Pasture Shelter  Article

PVCPlans.com has 3 PVC Poultry Pen Projects. These blueprints show you how to make the coops out of 1 inch pvc pipe. These PDF plans listed below have materials lists, and good instructions with complete diagrams. He has an Older Plan that is simple, a Complex Newer Plan and a Narrow Chicken House Option that has wheels so you can move it around like a Chicken Tractor.

More on Simple Old Style Plan  PDF

More on Portable Poultry Pen (Complex)  PDF

More on Narrow Poultry Pen with Wheels  PDF

Ana and Whitney get together to build this primo shed style chicken coop. Ana's site have the materials, tools and cutting list with detailed diagrams and lots of commentary on the constructions. Also go to Whitney's site, which I link to below, for her step-by-step project with lots of construction photos and discussion as she built it.

More on Whitney's site - Lots of Construction Photos

The Downeast Thunder Farm in Maine has a free chicken coop plan that is Built like Fort Knox. This plan will definitely keep out the predators who want to eat your chickens like hawks, fox, coyotes, raccoons, etc. This design features a 4x8 foot footprint, with a 8x12 foot chicken yard and deer netting over the top. He has an 8 page PDF plan and over 30 construction pictures.

More on Here are the Plans for this Coop  PDF

North Dakota State University has this great list of USDA Poultry Building Plans. There are over 100 plans listed here that range from Poultry Barns, feeders, runways for chicks, range shelters, egg laying house, layer barns, watering and feeding equipment, egg rack, and many other plans for a poultry farm and business.

Virginia Tech has a good article on Small Scale Poultry Housing. This article discusses poultry protection from predators, having adequate space for the birds, watering and feeding, light sources, ventilation, and more. There are plans for three poultry structures. A 50 to 80 Layer house, a 20x20 foot layer house, and an 8x8 Layer House for 15 to 20 Hens. There are no materials lists and limited instructions with these plans.

This free plan comes from the re-store.org. This project comes as a 10 page PDF. On the first page of the design are some drawings with dimensions. The next 9 pages have construction pictures with 30 blocks of commentary. As they mention these plans require a basic understanding of framing carpentry. These plans don't have a materials or cutting list and you have to ad-lib a lot.

The University of Missouri has this good 28 page PDF of their Chickens in the Backyard Workshop. There are no plans with this presentation but lots of good facts about raising your backyard chickens. They discuss planning, spacing, types of housing, predator protection, storage, flooring, ventilation, water and feed, lighting, nests and roosts. See the other resource links I have below, too.

More on Backyard Chicken Resources  Univ. of Missouri

More on Managing a Family Chicken Flock  PDF Univ. of Missouri

More on Brooding and Growing Chickens  PDF Univ. of Missouri

This Movable Chicken Ark comes from OrganicGardening.com. It is a 1 page PDF that has a materials list and some basic drawings. The dimensions on these drawing are too small to read but I included this Chicken Coop anyway because I liked the simplicity and layout. You will have to do a lot of ad-libbing with this plan but it just might be what you need for 4 or 5 chickens.

This Chicken Coop looks like a children's playhouse and is movable like a chicken tractor. So it might be a good one for an Urban Stealth Coop to fool your neighbors. The main link goes to the page with the picture. At the bottom of their page are coop drawings, and coop construction. The coop construction link takes you to a navigation page that has links to all the parts of the plan. This website's layout is a bit confusing but ultimately it's worth your time to take a look at this plan.

More on Coop Construction Navigation

More on Coop Drawings

What Chicken Coop Plans page is complete without a link to BackYardChickens.com? Which is a very large website devoted to Chicken Aficionados. This site is massive with almost 300,000 pages indexed in Google and over 2,000 chicken coop designs submitted by members. You could spend weeks on this site looking through everything. The plans range from very good to just a single picture so the quality varies but there is tons of great material here. See the Palace Chicken Coop Plan below for an example of a good plan.

More on The Palace Chicken Coop  Great Coop Design

MotherEarthNews.com has this unique design you can use to keep a few chickens in your backyard. First look at the Slideshow to see what the design looks like. There are no detailed drawings with this plan so you will have to make some of it up as you go. The article gives you instructions for building this project.

More on Slideshow Link

What I really liked about this plan is the commentary and pictures from people who have actually built it. That commentary is near the bottom of the article. There is no materials list so you will need to create that for yourself from his building instructions and illustrations. Nice diagrams and instructions on the process of building this coop. He goes over post & joists, flooring, girts and headers, rafters, roof and sidings, the nesting boxes, windows doors and finally the finishing touches.