There are lots of ways to make a duck house and the one you build is based on any combination of the following factors:
- safety from predators
- carpentry skill level
- time
- money
- portability
In our case, we are currently renting our homestead while I finished grad school. (So excited to get back to our permanent plot in Portland…) So what we build has to move with us. I also never seem to have enough time or money being in school right now.
Jay found a doghouse on the free section of Craig’s List and I have always wanted to reuse one for backyard livestock purposes. That was a great start to constructing the duck house portion. It wasn’t quite big enough, so Jay added on a couple more feet using recycled materials.
The inside is really simple. There is space to keep their duck feed and a nesting box for laying eggs. We still need to construct a door, in case we need to lock them up at night. But everything came together pretty quickly and pretty cheaply.
We hammered some corrugated metal onto the roof for a couple reasons: it matches the other coops in our backyard and will help direct rain off the duck house instead of through the cracks. It is now ready for a final paint job!
