Chickens: The Gateway Animal
Chickens. The gateway animal. Where it all begins. You start with a few cute fluffy butts and, before you know it, you have a couple dozen and are figuring out how many more you can fit in the chicken coop without your husband noticing. We’ve all been there.
They’re fun, cute, entertaining, they pay rent and are relatively easy to maintain. They are also a pandemic gym class staple. I send the kids out to chase chickens whenever they need to get the wiggles out.
So, if you’re contemplating if chickens are right for your family, the answer is most likely YES. But let me share this tip. It is important to be honest with yourself and plan to eventually have double or even triple the number of chickens you start with. When building the coop, design and build for at least double the size you think you need. It's called chicken math and it's real, people.
Chickens are a great start for any homestead and building a chicken coop is a really great project to build your confidence if you don’t have a construction background since, effectively, you are building a house that birds will poop all over. So, if a wall is not perfectly square, no worries! My husband had never built any type of structure before, so we did the responsible thing. We bought some plans online, spent about five minutes reviewing them, threw them in the trash and made our own design. He said I could design it any way I wanted, leaving no detail spared. He was probably eating his words a couple weeks into it because it definitely wasn’t the shortest project nor the most simple build but it turned out amazing!
Before getting chickens, I recommend the following resources:
- The Chicken Chick's Guide to Backyard Chickens
- The Chicken Health Handbook 2nd Edition
- Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens 4th Edition
When the time comes, I encourage you to visit my Amazon Farmstead page to find all my favorite chicken keeping items, including chick electrolytes, chick heating plate, automatic feeders, chicken waterer bins, nesting box liners, and so much more! It's all there!!
After successfully building the coop, we felt like we could tackle anything. The moral of the story? With each project, you learn something new. And the more successes you have, the more confidence you build and the bigger your dreams can become. That’s one of the reasons my husband and I love homesteading so much. So…what’s on your build list?
