Cassie and I worked all day yesterday to get the turkey coop painted using up the existing paint we had on hand, framing/cutting out the windows and putting up the final touches including the trim.  It was a pretty long day, we started working ~9am and didn’t finish until around 4 in the afternoon.

Again, a lot of time working on the coop has been spent reusing old materials which adds a lot of work but saves a lot of money.  In the end it is worth it to us.

We built this coop to have a similar design to our chicken coop as that design has worked out well.  This coop has a screen door to add a bit more airflow and we didn’t have an extra door laying around. There is also a trap door on the floor of this coop so that we can someday enclose the base with chicken wire and have the turkeys raise their poults underneath without fear of the hawks.  They will still need to sleep in the coop due to rats, but they will have space to dust bathe in and peck around.

We used materials from the wood house’s deck as that deck will be replaced with new lumber, and I even grabbed T-111 sheets from the upstairs bedroom.  The paint for the turkey coop was leftover from painting our cabana and the blue trim leftover from the chicken coop.  All in all we spent less than $100 on the new coop.  In new materials we estimate it would have cost close to $1000 which would have been waaayyy too much for us to spend on a coop.

Paint makes such a difference.  We know this as we have done many a remodel project but yet it still amazes us.  Before painting the coop it looked like a true to life hillbilly shack complete with a hillbilly.

The Turkeys are now moved in which is great because they are growing fast and have outgrown the turkey cage/tractor we had them in.  They were having to crouch to get around and there wasn’t adequate space to keep a full size feeder and waterer so we were having to check on them multiple times a day.  The coop will not only make the turkeys happier but also will be less work.

Space Between (click to enlarge)

We left quite a bit of tree nursery space between the two coops.  We haven’t ever raised turkeys so we actually weren’t too sure how much space if any was needed.  It is possible to have them co-exist in the same coop but there are chicken to turkey diseases that can be transmitted.

We are happy with the results and figure for a turkey coop, the turkeys have a pretty nice crib.