Designs for a New Goat House & Coop

As you may have read in my last farm post “Everybody’s In The Dog House“, my goats have been booted from their home by the chickens and are now living in a (very) large dog house. Now normally (although they were not initially very happy about it) this is not a bad living situation for them, but with all of the snow we’ve been getting lately I feel just terrible. There’s a virtual blizzard out my window right now as I write this, and they seem to be coming on an almost daily basis, which is highly unusual for normal Connecticut winters. Plus, they will both (hopefully) have kids come May so I need some suitable housing ASAP.

The point here is that’s it’s forced the issue of getting a larger facility built.

One of my best friends, Michelle, is an architect. She also happens to be out of work at the moment thanks to this economy. Since I can’t add one more morsel of work to my schedule, I realized that this would be perfect for Michelle to design. I think she’s enjoying it, and she’s learning more about small hobby farming than she ever thought she’d want to know!

We spoke last Friday to talk about what I had in mind as far as design and the specifics needs that I had, and she came over yesterday with three initial concept!. I’m just so excited about everything that she did I have to show you.

Now although they look like grand ornate barns, the chicken coop will be 8’x10′ and the goat barn will be 15’x10′. The best part of it is that we’ll build the goat barn in 3 5’x10′ sections that we can join together, so when I finally convince Jim to move to the real “farm” I can just detach the sections, haul it up onto a truck and take it with me! If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it right, and I’m taking it with me.

That thing that looks like a silo is really going to be a fenced chicken area, which will be perfect for young chicks and for cover in bad weather. It will also allow the chickens to “visit” the goats, but the door size will not allow the goats to “visit” the chicken coop and eat the food that makes them sick (and fat).

Design #1 with "Silo" Chicken Run

This is the second concept that she came up with:

I love parts of both designs #1 and #2. We discussed revisions today and hopefully by next week we’ll have the basic layout and design complete. I’ll

And although this final concept was never really either of our favorites, I’ll show this one to you too. It was really based on more of a “compound” feeling that a single housing unit.

She did such a great job and I cannot wait to see the final “mix” of the two designs that we discussed today. I’ll share them with you when I get them.