Chicks in The Suburbs: The Coop

I have spent more time trying to decide on a coop than you can imagine. There are the over the top coops and the totally recycled coops. While I absolutely love the look of a beautifully constructed wooden coop, I know that means a lot of maintenance and potential for wet wood and mites (yuck). I stumbled upon the Eglu coops last year and was completely intrigued by the design and ease of cleaning. The down side to the Eglu is everyone here in the U.S. that ‘does not’ have one for some reason talks about how terrible they are and how for so much cheaper you can build a wooden coop. I do realize that, but also realize that wood rots.

We purchased the plans to The Garden Coop, I really like his design and the plans are very straight forward with lots of pictures (always helpful). I thought this would look nice in our backyard and looks to provide a lovely space for hens to live. However, I kept getting a feeling in my gut that Eglu would be the way to go with a custom walk-in-run (“WIR”). Since I’ll be the one cleaning, I may as well make it as easy on myself as possible. I reached out to a handful of Eglu owners and every single person sang its praises, not one person had a negative thing to say other than you definitely need to build a larger run than what comes with the coop. I was driving my husband mad, I couldn’t decide. Thank you to Girl Rural for all her patience with my endless coop questions.

I finally decided last week we’d go with Eglu and build The Garden Coop minus the hen house for our WIR. Next plaguing question was do we get the Eglu Go or the Eglu Cube. Can you believe how difficult I’m making this for myself? A few people I reached out to had two Go’s and were quite happy. It seems everyone starts with 2-3 hens, and then adds 2-3 more. This sort of addition is called chicken math.

I really only wanted 3 hens, so the smaller Go made sense, but along the way we decided we wanted to add some Silkie bantam hens to the 3 laying hens we intend on getting, so as you can see we already have chicken math going on and need more space. The Cube would be the big winner as it states it can hold 10 chickens, but honestly, I wouldn’t put more than 5-6 in there as we have long winters.

Cube

Next up, ordering the coop, oh the excitement and anticipation. I contacted Omlet’s customer service as I know these can be on backorder as they are shipped from the U.K. – this could totally change things if there was going to be a long wait. I spoke to the customer service representative who was a delightful English gal and placed my order for the Cube last Wednesday and low and behold to my surprise the local Greyhound station called Saturday morning and said we have your 5 boxes here ready for pick-up. What a pleasant surprise, I had no idea we’d get it so fast.

Eglu ships their coops over in a container from the U.K. and are then shipped to you via Greyhound Package Express to the nearest Greyhound station to where you live. The Cube comes in 5 rather large boxes, but did fit quite comfortably in the back of our mini van with the 3rd row seat taken out.

The Cube comes in a variety of fun colors, red, purple, orange, yellow, pink and green. I opted for green as I thought it was fun and would blend the best in our back yard. My daughter was hoping for purple. Right now the 5 large boxes are sitting in our garage waiting to be put together.

My favorite coops.