Treehouse Chicken Coop

For the past several mornings, I’ve woken up with what I refer to as “fire fingers”. My fingers tingle, and the numbness goes up to my shoulder. I’m covered in scrapes, and my hands feel like sandpaper. My husband now has the neighbors thinking he’s a professional carpenter. We haven’t been to the gym in months — we haven’t done anything social. We haven’t signed up for spring soccer. We skipped THE BIG chess tournament. We have worked our patooties off so that just in time for the first day of spring, we were ready for outdoor living. The treehouse chicken coop is complete with a hammock to boot. Thank you thank you thank you, Joe, my hero, my partner in labor and love, the guy who makes my dreams come true.

I lost track of how many days we worked on this project, but it’s been a steady effort that only paused for one really cold, rainy spell. We started tearing down the old treehouse during the middle of the shed project and picked up with this mid-February. About halfway through the treehouse build, I started on the coop build. This past weekend we added the chickens. So this was constructed over the span of six weeks and was dreamed about for much longer. We didn’t use a plan or kit, but we did refer to deck span and spacing tables for the treehouse to make sure we were structurally sound.

The treehouse sits on 6″x6″x8′ posts and is 10′ by 10′ and surrounds a beautiful magnolia tree. The rails are 4′ tall with space for the kids to slide under and shimmy down the sides to the ground. There is a small dropped down platform for the slide. The coop is 5’x4′ with the back wall height at about 3′ and the front wall at about 5′. The coop is set up on cinder blocks and sturdy enough for the kids to climb on. The run, or the caged part of the treehouse, is approximately 7’x10′ with the height at approximately 7.5′. We used 1/2″ hardware cloth for the fencing. The windows of the coop and the screen door on the run were both found at Habit Restore locations. The chicken roost ladder in the run and the ladder for the slide are salvaged from previous decking railing that we replaced a few years ago. The slide was from the previous treehouse and acquired from one of Joe’s coworkers.