Born of Necessity.

After the generous gift of a chicken shed that needed at least two people to move and its size meant you had to climb into it and clean it out whilst bent double, I thought that there must be an easier way to house a few hens. Most of the houses on the market were either specially built sheds with felt roofing and a large door or were the traditional ark covered with shiplap boarding and constructed from heavy chipboard and timber. There were very few made from ply wood.

I then began making scale models to see how few sheets of ply I could use. After many hours at the drawing board, cutting up bits of card and strips of wood and then going back to the drawing board, the final design uses just two sheets of 8' x 4' quarter inch ply bought from the nearest DIY store and some 2" x 1" and 1" x 1" treated timber from a local saw mill.

The model looked like this

The first prototype like this

and the final one like this

You could buy the finished Shack for £135 + p&p or build your own from plans for £5 incl p+p

BUT we don't want to do that!

While we have had no complaints from our human customers, we suspect that some of the feathered ones would comment. The prototype you see above, has been in use for several years but it stands next to a chicken house made from recycle pallet timber in a fox proof building. When the chickens have come in from wandering about the fields, the building is closed up and the hens are free to choose where they roost for the night. One by one those hens that had first chosen to live in the Chicken Shack, moved over to the old house. We shall soon be developing Flat Pack Chicken Shack Mk 2, that we hope will tempt those hens back to a new home that they have chosen to live in, not because they were shut in the night before. Watch this space for developements during 2007

For more information please e-mail Adrian or phone 01822 820345

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