We have wooden coops at the allotment, made by DH and OC (Other Chap).
They are fine, but the nest boxes are a nuisance to clean when I do the red mite preventative treatment. It;s fiddly to get the Aubiose out, and then they take ages to dry.
We'd bought a chick box to try, but it wasn't really suitable. I asked DH about doing something different with the floor of the next boxes so I could sort of take the floor out and have the old nest material fall through. He discovered ecosheets, and thought about making replacement nest boxes out of that, and designing them so they could be removed for cleaning.
From there, he started to think about building a whole new coop, and calculated how many ecosheets he would need. We then looked at ready-made recycled-plastic hen houses, which sounded very good value... but then we realised that by the time we got something the right size, it wasn't so cheap.
And then I saw a purple cube in one of the papers, and it was advertised relatively cheaply (not quite as cheap as making a coop ourselves) because it didn't have a run. We talked about it, and I bought it. I decided I'd prefer to have the purple one in the garden and have the green one (less obvious) on the allotment.
We collected it today. The previous owners had already jet washed and poultry shielded it, which was fantastic. We took it apart completely when we got home, and ended up jet washing and disinfecting it all anyway, because there were bits that just can't be jetwashed when the Cube is complete.
We've done the home swap now, and it's looking very smart. We haven't taken the green one down to the allotment yet
