I know it’s a grandiose claim, but after testing out our Egg Cart’n Chalet from www.eggcartn.com and after trying other options over the years, this clever design ticks all of the boxes for our homestead. My daughter and I made a video unboxing, setting up and revealing this build.
Just a few years back, as rookie homesteaders, one of the first things we did (like many new homesteaders) was build a chicken coop. We ended up building an aesthetically pleasing, heavy duty design, but we missed the mark on so many levels.
First, we way overbuilt our coop. It wasn’t our intention, we used standard construction materials, shingles on the roof, treated plywood, 2x4s, etc, but in the end this thing could withstand a hurricane. What we overlooked was the fact that wood rots. Even though we protected the floor with linoleum the floor still rotted, twice! I’m convinced our chicken’s poo is akin to battery acid!
The coop is well built but its a nightmare to clean out. It’s the most dreaded chore on our homestead. Drag out a tarp, scoop out the old bedding and waste. It’s stinky, messy and an inefficient process.
After a few years, the goats tore away the shingles on the egg door. We replaced them, they tore off more. We added more. The ram on the door broke. After a few years and some failed fixes the egg door is very heavy to lift each time.
Criteria for a Quality Coop
It’s also immobile. Initially we kept the chickens locked up, but they love to free range. Free ranging chickens are great for killing insects and ticks and for fertilizing our turf. Since we cannot move our coop we often let the chickens free range. This presents problems because we now have stashes of eggs laid all over our 20 acre property. It’s also a problem because of predators and we’ve lost a few chickens to chicken hawks and other predators. On one hand we don’t want to lock them up on the other we don’t want to risk them getting attacked by predators.
After a lot of research, we decided to seek out a superior chicken coop solution that would check off the following boxes:
• Must be built to last
• Must be portability
• Must hold at least 10 chickens
• Must be easy to clean
Egg Cart’n Chalet
After a lot of research, we found the Egg Cart’n Chalet at www.eggcartn.com. First, the company is a small family-owned business with great reviews and testimonials. The Egg Cart’n Chalet is built with a metal roof, aluminum frame and heavy duty perforated plastic flooring. It’s built to last AND its built with materials that will not rot like wood does.
This is more than a coop, rather a portable chicken coop tractor. It has many clever features like a ramp that can be lowered or raised to allow the chickens access to the grass below. The coop features heavy duty doors with locks and windows. There is a sliding egg access door on the back. It’s also built with a most clever setup for portability. It uses an EZ Lift system to lift and move the chicken coop/tractor anywhere you’d like. We can move the chickens around our property and allow them to eat insects and fertilize our turf, from within the safety of the coop. The way it’s designed using a latch system and leverage, we can easily move it around with one hand
The Egg Cart’n Chalet can house 8 to 12 chickens. We have 10.
Lastly and one of the things we most overlooked aspects of owning a chicken coop is ease & efficiency of cleaning. The frame is aluminum the floor is 1″ perforated polypropylene. The entire unit can be powerwashed out to clean it. We LOVE this feature. SInce its portable we can simply wheel it on over to our hose and power wash it out OR we can roll it into our compost area and clean it out there and recycle the waste.
Finally the packaging and instructions were great. The instructions were in perfect English. The hardware all came in bags and each were labeled. The various sections of the coop were also labeled. The step by step instructions included images. We set the entire coop up in about 2 hours.
So those are all of the pros and our honest review of the Chicken Chalet. In terms of negatives, we haven’t found any yet. We plan to do another video and review after using it for the summer.
Be sure to watch my daughter and I work together to unbox and build our new chicken coop and see what the best chicken coop in the world looks like.
Kerry W. Mann, Jr. moved to a 20-acre homestead in 2015, where he and his family use modern technology, including YouTube and Instructables.com, to learn new skills and teach homestead projects. Connect with Kerry on his Homestead How YouTube page, Instructables, Pinterest, Facebook, and at My Evergreen Homestead. Read all of Kerry’s MOTHER EARTH NEWS posts here.
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