Temporary Chicken Coop - Easy DIY for Backyard Chickens

This post contains affiliate links. Learn More

Need a temporary chicken coop or just an alternate spot to park a few birds? Here’s some cheap and easy chicken coop ideas.

When you have chickens in the backyard, there could well be times when you actually need another place to house come of them. Or, if you haven’t had the chance to actually build a coop before they arrive, you have to have someplace to put them.

Here’s how we arrange a temporary chicken coop on our homestead. All it takes is some type of easy housing, some T posts and wire.

Temporary chicken coop with roost, nest boxes and hay with chickens inside. — If you ever need to move a couple of chickens, you will appreciate having a temporary chicken coop.

We were fortunate enough to have a tiny wooden frame building we used, when we had to separate our flock. But, read on for other things you can use for a portable chicken coop. You will find an idea or two for inspiration!

Little chicken coop with door open and a ramp with 4 chickens. — Any little building you have can work as a temporary coop!

This is an old goat house that was on the property when we bought it. We used it first for our main chicken coop. We started with 4 chickens as I wasn’t sure whether I would like having them.

I had zero experience with raising chickens and starting with small numbers would allow me, as a beginner, to ease into raising farm animals. Turns out, we loved having chickens and every year we kept getting more and more.

We worked on getting a proper hen house down at the barn and once we did, we moved all the girls in there.

Our Large Chicken Coop Design

Over on another post about when we built a barn, we wrote about how we built a chicken coop with multiple outdoor runs, nesting boxes and roosts for the hens to sit on. Check it out if you want to see our DIY chicken coop plan.

Nesting boxes in a chicken coop. — These nesting boxes are in the larger barn chicken coop.

Anyway, a few years later, we had 17 hens and were getting about 9 eggs a day. Some of the hens were 3 years old and we weren’t sure who was laying and who was enjoying a free ride in the Valley.

While we enjoy raising animals, we feel they have to pull their own weight, so to speak. So if some hens weren’t laying at all we needed to figure that out and dispatch the free loaders.

Small Chicken Coops

I moved the hens in two at a time over to the small goat house, in an attempt to find out who was laying and who was not. We took the easy way out and made a nesting box out of a cardboard box and some hay as cushioning and it worked great.

For feeding, we just hung a homemade chicken feederfrom the ceiling. For feeding, we just hung a homemade chicken feeder from the ceiling. We threw some dirt on the floor for them and added a shallow tub of sand to give them some grit.

I’ve read you can check the hens vents to see if they are nice and pink and those should be the ones laying. I couldn’t figure it out, they all looked pretty good and yet, still only about 7 or 8 eggs a day. So I started using the other coop for housing.

And it worked. It took awhile, but we found out that only 9 hens were laying consistently. So, we culled the rest and used their meat for dog food.

Temporary chicken coop with a wire fence around it and 2 chickens in the run. — Add a sturdy wire fence to keep the chickens inside.

We had set up temporary fencing around the goat house, so the exiled hens could run around outside during the day. Read all about how easy it is to set up temporary fencing for chickens here.

Once we figured out who wasn’t laying and dispatched them, it was time to take down the fencing.

Temporary fencing for a large chicken run. — Using temporary fencing is a great way to expand your chickens ranging.

We can’t leave temporary fencing up over winter. Since we use a lot of chicken wire in the fencing (because it’s lightweight so I can easily move it around myself) the winter snows would just crush it. So, at the end of the season, I have to take down all the chicken run fencing that ran around the temporary coop.

More Ideas for a Portable Chicken Coop

An unused truck canopy sits on bales of hay providing housing for the white chickens. — Look around and see what you can recycle into a home for your birds.

Here’s another possibility. The following year we needed extra room for meat birds we were raising. Looking around, we found we had a truck canopy we weren’t using. So, we set that up on bales of hay for a sturdy and insulated small coop for them.

Need more ideas for coop possibilities? Why not make a chicken tractor? The tractor is a great idea, if you have the time to make it, because you can use them not only as a portable chicken coop, but you can actually move them around.

This allows the chickens fresh grass to eat and it won’t wear your lawn down if you keep moving the tractor every other day or so.

Other possibilities include using an empty playhouse, or building a simple coop with pallets. Make portable coops with plastic piping and greenhouse plastic.

Any of these makes for a good low-cost option for housing chickens in the backyard! Want to read more of our chicken raising posts?

Find out the best ways to store fresh eggs (which you’ll need to know for Spring time). Got questions about keeping backyard chickens? You can find even more common chicken questions and answers here.

Wondering what does the term straight run chickensmean? And, here’s a post about how to keep chickens from being bored. Finally, you can read about our experiment of learning to grow fodder for chicken feed.