Chicken Palace Construction: Stage Two

I am super stoked about how things are coming along with my new and improved chicken coop AKA the Chicken Palace.  My friends were able to come and help me so we got walls and such put together in short order.

First was the end wall with the door.  We simply held the plywood up to the end of the structure and traced the shape of the hoop onto the wood.   Using a sawzall we cut the plywood sheets down to the proper shape. The end needed two sheets of plywood to fill it in completely so we stacked them on top of each other to fill it all out.  The bottom was secured with screws and then the top was held in place by drilling holes and wiring the wood down to the structure as well as using small scraps of wood to brace the separate sheets to each other.

The next step was bracing the wall with a couple of studs.  The studs would run from the floor to the arc of the curved roof on either side of what would become the main door.  This helped to stabilize the end wall and give a little more support to the structure of the hoop roof.  Once the studs were screwed into place I proceeded to cut the doors out of the wall.  I made a small door in the corner of the coop for the chickens and added a latch so that I could lock it up at night and a hook that would hold the door open during the day.  In the center I cut a me-sized door with an arc at the top to keep with the curved roof line theme.  The door will be a dutch door and I plan on making a window in the top to help ventilate the structure better.  I may add an RV window to this wall before I  am finished, but for now I am just going to stick with the doors on this end.

The other end went up in much the same way and once it was secure we went to work on covering the cattle panel hoop walls with corrugated metal roofing.  The roofing panels were held in place by screwing them into 12 foot lengths of 2x4's that were cut into halves and held against the inside of the hoop structure as purlins.

The purlins were then secured to the end walls with screws to add more rigidity to the structure.  Once the center purlin was screwed into place the entire structure lost any wobble that it had.  Now my chickens will have a strong safe place to call their home.  The gaps at either end will be covered with flashing to make the structure more water proof.  I realize that there will likely be roof leaks with the many holes through the metal, but we don't get a ton of rain here, so I am not too worried about it.  Also with the open floor plan, keeping things dried out shouldn't be a problem

  Now all that is left to do is finish the details.  I am going to build a few nest boxes inside the front wall and cut a door on that end so that I can access the boxes from the outside.  I am also going to build boxes to fit around the wheel wells to protect tender chicken feet from any sharp metal there.  The wheel well boxes will support the roosting bars that will run the length of the coop.  Eventually I will be adding feeders and a watering system that can be accessed from the outside as well.  Since this coop is becoming an all in one chicken palace I might even build an area for food storage right on the tongue of the trailer to make things even easier for me.  For the record though I am very happy with how things look right now.  It is turning out just the way I pictured it.