Another Shed

With the season for baby chicks coming upon us quickly, it was time for me to revisit the plan for the chicken shed and see how that works for us now. And really, the thing we need more than anything in the yard is a permanent storage shed to hold things like the lawnmowers we keep accumulating (every time a neighbor moves out, we seem to get their lawnmower) and so forth. While that stuff is in the big shed right now, the big shed will eventually go away and be replaced by a greenhouse, so I don't want to get too dependent on it.

Most of the construction details and layout stuff with the original chicken house plan still work, but I want to try to stick a small shed on the back of it. I figured I could just double the footprint (from 4'x 8' to 8'x 8') without too much trouble, and the chickens sure as heck won't need as much space as I originally designed, so their quarters simply become a little smaller, and then we have a nicely sized 5'x 8' shed for the garden.

A much bigger shed needs to get a lot cuter, because it's suddenly a design element in the landscape. So things like little windows, window boxes of flowers, and maybe a more decorative fence are more important. I haven't worked out how I want all that to look. Here's my gestural drawing showing the rough shape and layout:

And a section to show how the space is divided:

I've still got a lot of work on designing some of the more fiddly details, and especially thinking about how I'm going to keep the inevitable gasoline smells from the lawn mowers from getting to the birds. I'm also trying to figure out how I want a completely covered run to work with the chicken house. And all this to be worked out in the next two weeks, so we can get cracking on the actual construction (which will probably go hand-in-hand with replacing the back fence).

Technorati Tags: architecture, chickens, design, shed, urban farming

posted by ayse on 01/22/08