The dusting of snow in the Cascades this weekend made Becky and I expedite our latest home-tinker project: Chicken Run 2.0

Raising the chickens has been an iterative journey for us, and our first chicken run enclosure built out of some old cedar fence boards, pallets and a trampoline tarp was clearly not a winter-ready design. Our chicken mentor Dianne was kind enough to gift us some building materials from one of her old chicken runs, so we picked up a few more boards and got to work.

We had one design envisioned when we were at Home Depot, but when we got home to the backyard, we pivoted to do things a wee bit different. This most definitely isn’t our final “dream” chicken enclosure, but we just wanted something to keep the ladies warm and out of the elements this winter.

We leveraged the existing fence posts, which they likely aren’t designed for, but things seem mostly stable-ish. I’ll report back in a comment after the first windstorm though.

We are still going to construct another structure under the covered area, and relocate their coop to be mostly under the cover too. It seems the subject of heating chicken coops/runs is a hot topic of backyard hen tenders. I’m still doing some research, but I think we will likely incorporate some sort of heat source under the cover too.

Lessons were definitely learned which will help make the great chicken run 3.0 build of next spring super awesome.

🐔