Well my name is Galen Bontrager. I’m the owner and operator of Galen Bontrager Farm based out in Wellman, Iowa. And in this video, we’re showing you how to assemble a chicken coop.

We’ve come to the second step here now of building the nest box area and the ladder for that nest box. To accomplish our next step with assembling the next box, the first thing that we would do is we assemble this back piece and we screw that up at both ends. We measure at about 8 inches off the ground, 8-9 inches, and set that piece in place. Screw both ends. Next, we’ll put in our 2x6 on the front. Again, this needs to be a little longer than 4 feet, about 4 ½ so that it sets squarely on the bottom bracing as opposed to butting into it. There will be more strength that way. Screw in on both sides at this end. Screw both sides at the other end. And then on setting our top pieces, again those are about 14 inches long and set those out and screw those in on both ends. And then I move to the top of these and screw that in both ends.

Next, I do these, putting in the base boards. And those are kind of shorter than 48, and you can screw two on each board and then do that on the second board and on both ends. Now, we can put in our nest box plate and the covering dividers, so there’s room for a few more hens. We just bend that piece of metal and put that in place. There is a hole there that we could screw through, and screw one and two, and then one and two on the added metal piece.

Now we’re ready for our ladder. To do that, we get our first hinge mounted. We use this 3-inch square hinge and we use that. Now we’re switching over to a quarter inch driver for these three quarter inch screws. We fasten the hinge down with that and then we fasten our other piece on with 1x6 and make our lengthwise piece fasten the hinge together and fasten that piece to the hinge. Then, we do that on the other side, we do the same thing. We fasten our hinge down and then fasten the hinge to the other piece that will swing down. Now, we have two free swinging pieces.

Next, we pull in a few more pieces and these are 1x6. We switch back to our Philips head screwdriver. And then these I cut a little bit shorter than 48. They’re actually 45 inches so that they swing feely without hitting the cross bracing or anything else on the sides of the pen. And then we fasten those down with two screws in each and fasten that together. Now we set up our hook to close the nest box up at night. With this, we swing the ladder up and we set our screws so we know where we can hook it at.

And in the up position, tie off your twine at a particular spot. That is what holds it in that position when it’s closed at night. That completes the step for this process with the nest box assembly. And now, we’re ready to move on to the next step which is to assemble the cover for the top of this pen.