A lot of chicken owners or people who plan on getting their own flock, seeks for a chicken ark plans that would be easy to move, cheap and simple to build. If you are after such qualities, than a movable chicken ark is for you. A chicken ark is a coop that has triangular shape, this makes it incredibly easy to build even for people who have never held a hammer in their hand before. As to mobility of the construction there are couple of ways you can insure it will be easy to change their location.
How should it move
There are basically two ways to move your chicken ark, either make it so light that you can just pick it up and place it somewhere else or include wheels that will help to transport it. The solution you choose largely depends on what you need. If you want to change the position of your ark every couple of days, to provide your chickens with fresh grass, than you should install wheels. However if you want to change the location every month or so, you can decide to use very light structure that will be easy to move.
If you want to build your ark without wheels, you have to remember that it shouldn’t be too light. It has to withhold strong winds as well as attacks of predators. These factors make it harder to build as you need to plan for nearly every possibility.
How large should it be
Your next concern should be the size of the chicken ark. As a rule of thumb, every chicken requires a least 3 to 5 square feet inside the chicken house, to feel comfortable. Using these guidelines, you should plan your chicken ark plan based on the amount of birds you want to keep.
What kind of materials do you need
The main advantage of a chicken ark is its simple design. This single most important characteristic, makes it very easy and cheap to build. You don’t need a lot of wood and you can find most of the materials for free. I recommend asking around, for useless pieces of materials that can be possible building blocks for your chicken ark.
Including windows
The tricky part of building a chicken ark is including windows that will provide enough light, but won’t disturb your chickens. Because of the triangular shape, your best bet is to place the windows on the ends of the ark, walls that are perpendicular to the ground.
This is the best place, as it will not blind your chickens every morning, and it makes the entire construction much more durable.
Identifying access points
You have to remember that you will need access points in order to clean your chicken ark and collect eggs your flock layed. The most common solution is making one of the roof wings openable. This will give you large window that allows you to easily clean your chicken ark.
Protecting your flock from predators
The biggest flow and at the same time advantage of a chicken ark is simple and usually quite light construction. It doesn’t matter if it is durable, because of the design you usually don’t use too much materials that would be heavy enough to protect your chickens from dangerous predators.
Rather than decrease the mobility of your chicken ark, by adding heavy elements, I recommend adding metal bars that dug into the floor will act as foundations of your chicken house.
This however is still not enough if you have to face predators that like to dig their way to your chicken ark. In such case you can either include a floor, or dig some of the excess fence into the ground. On the other hand such solutions will make your chicken ark harder to move, thus you should consider if this design is really best for you.
As you can see building a chicken ark doesn’t have to be as hard as most of the people think. If you will decide to go with chicken ark plan, you won’t regret it, they are easy to build, durable and can be transported to different locations without much effort. But always give some thought, if your chickens will be really safe in your ark.
