We Built Our DIY Cheap Backyard Chicken Coop for $200—Here’s Exactly How

“Just use pallets,” Ben said. “Free wood. Done.”

That was month two of us living out here, and I had been reading every forum thread I could find about building a cheap backyard chicken coop. Half of them had that slightly rustic, DIY cheap backyard chicken coop aesthetic that looks great in photos—mismatched wood, salvaged windows, some paint color with a name like Sage Whisper. The other half were practical and ugly. I wanted something in the middle. Ben wanted to be done by Sunday.

The Pallet Situation (Why Free Isn’t Always Cheaper)

We drove forty minutes to pick up fourteen pallets from a flooring warehouse. Free, no problem, take as many as you want. Got home, stacked them in the pasture, and stood there feeling very resourceful.

Then we actually looked at them.

Some had been treated with chemicals I couldn’t identify. A few had the HT stamp—heat treated, safe—but others were unmarked, and I wasn’t putting chickens near mystery-treated wood. Three pallets had soft spots in the center boards, one had a nail pattern that would have required a full hour of removal per panel, and two had boards spaced so far apart that a weasel could have walked through sideways.

We ended up using four of them. Four. The rest sat in the pasture for six months until Ben cut them up for kindling. Meanwhile, we had spent a Saturday hauling them, a Sunday sorting through them, and two evenings trying to salvage boards that turned out not to be worth saving. If I’d started at the lumber yard, I would have been ahead on time and not much behind on cost. I’m not saying don’t use pallets. I’m saying: look at them before you commit a weekend.

We ended up using four pallets out of fourteen. The other ten sat in the pasture until Ben turned them into kindling.

Where We Actually Found Materials for $200

Once we gave up on the pallet-first approach, we built the coop in about three weekends using a combination of sources. Here’s what worked:

• Facebook Marketplace free section: Search “wood” or “lumber” and set alerts for your county. We found a guy clearing a fence line who had a pile of 4×4 posts and 2×6 boards in decent shape. He just wanted them gone. These became our framing.
• Craigslist fence panels: Someone was replacing their wood privacy fence with vinyl and listed the old panels for $5 each. We bought six. They became two walls of the coop with minimal cutting.
• Reclaimed windows: Habitat for Humanity ReStore. Ours had two locations within 45 minutes and usually stocks old windows for $10–$25 each. We got a 24×36 single-pane window for $12. Ventilation and light, handled.
• Hardware store end-of-season sales: In Tennessee, late September is when the big box stores mark down exterior paint, deck screws, and sometimes roofing materials. We bought a gallon of exterior primer and a box of 3-inch exterior screws in a clearance bin for about $11 total.
• New hardware cloth: This we bought new, at Tractor Supply. Half-inch mesh, 25-foot roll. About $32. More on the chicken wire debate in a minute.
• Metal roofing panels: Ben found a single pallet of seconds at a local farm supply store—panels with cosmetic scratches, deeply discounted. We needed six panels. Paid $47.

Total for the actual build materials: around $210, not counting the pallet experiment.

The Coop Doesn’t Need to Look Good

I went into this wanting something that looked intentional. After three weekends of building it, I stopped caring entirely. The hens were going to cover every surface in pine shaving dust and manure anyway. Pepper broke into the coop twice in the first month just out of curiosity and left hoof prints on everything. June waited outside and looked disappointed.

We painted exactly nothing. The reclaimed fence panels were weathered gray. The framing lumber was yellowish pine. The window had chipped white paint on the trim. Somehow, the whole thing ended up looking… fine. Not styled. Just old and varied in the way that old things get when they’re made from different sources. People who came over to see the chickens kept saying it looked “charming.” I don’t think that’s a compliment I earned on purpose.

What I’m saying is: don’t spend mental energy on aesthetics before you build. If you use varied reclaimed materials and build something structurally sound, it will probably look decent by accident. If you paint it all one color after the fact, it’ll look even more finished. But the chickens will not care either way, and neither will you by the time you’re doing the third coop cleaning.

Four Things Your Chickens Actually Require (Everything Else Is Optional)

I went deep on coop design research. Embarrassingly deep. Here is what I found when I stripped out all the advice about aesthetics, lifestyle, and optional upgrades:

1. Ventilation: More than you think. In Tennessee summers, heat kills chickens faster than cold does. You need openings near the roofline that allow air to move through without creating a direct draft on the roost. Our window opens at the top. We also cut two 6-inch vented strips along the peak of the roofline and covered them with hardware cloth. Chickens can handle a Tennessee winter in an unheated coop if they’re dry and out of drafts. They cannot handle August with no airflow.
2. Predator protection: Hardware cloth, not chicken wire, on any opening. Hardware cloth is welded at every joint. Chicken wire has twisted joints that a determined raccoon can pull apart. Bury the apron of any fencing at least 12 inches down, or bend it outward on the ground to block diggers. Lock the coop door every night. Every night. You will forget once, and that will be the night something gets in.
3. Nesting boxes: One box per four to five birds is usually enough. Ours are 12×12 inches, which is standard for most laying breeds. Don’t overthink depth or height—12 inches square, a few inches of pine shavings inside, positioned lower than the roost so the hens don’t sleep in them.
4. Roosting bars: Chickens need somewhere elevated to sleep. Round dowels look right but aren’t—chickens need a flat surface wide enough to cover their feet. We used 2x4s laid flat. The broad side gives them something to sit on so their breast feathers cover their toes in cold weather, which matters in a climate like ours where January nights can drop into the teens.

How Much Did We Really Spend?

The honest answer is: it depends on what you count.

If you count only the materials that ended up in the finished coop, we spent about $210. If you count the pallet run—gas, time, and the four half-destroyed lumber pieces we bought to supplement what the pallets couldn’t give us—add roughly $80 to $100. The run, which we built two months after the coop, cost another $140 in hardware cloth, t-posts, and gate hardware. So the full setup was closer to $450 before we had a complete, functional space for our flock.

When people ask me if we built our chicken coop for $200, I say yes and then immediately explain that answer. The coop itself, yes. The total setup, no. Most budget coop tutorials are measuring the same way—just the coop, not the run, not the failed first attempt, not the hardware you had to replace. That’s not dishonest exactly, just incomplete.

The University of Tennessee Extension has solid baseline guidance on small flock poultry housing if you want specs from people who have studied it. Their recommendations on minimum space per bird are more conservative than most blog posts, and in my experience they’re right.

TL;DR: Budget $200–250 for the coop structure using reclaimed materials. Budget another $100–150 for a basic run. Add a contingency for whatever doesn’t work the first time, because something won’t.

Why the Exterior Finish Matters (And Why It Doesn’t)

We bought a wood preservative—a penetrating oil type, not a film-forming stain—and treated all the exterior framing and fence panel wood before assembly. It cost about $28 for a quart, and we used most of it. My reasoning was that reclaimed wood had already started aging and might rot faster than new pressure-treated lumber. This seemed logical.

Whether it was actually necessary, I genuinely can’t tell you. The coop is going into its second full year and nothing has rotted. But I don’t have a control coop. Maybe the untreated version would also be fine. Maybe it would have started showing soft spots by now. The wood preservative purchase felt like the right call in the moment and I haven’t regretted it, but I’m not confident I can say it made a measurable difference. If you’re using pressure-treated lumber for framing, you probably don’t need additional treatment. If you’re using fence boards that have been outside for five years, I’d probably do it again.

Sarah’s Advice vs. What Actually Happened

Our neighbor Sarah has kept chickens for fifteen years. She told us, twice, to use hardware cloth everywhere and to never trust chicken wire. “You’ll lose birds,” she said. She was not being dramatic. She has lost birds to raccoons who worked through chicken wire over the course of a few nights.

We used hardware cloth on the windows and coop openings. On the run, though, we used chicken wire because we ran out of budget. Sarah saw it and said nothing, which was somehow worse than if she’d said something.

It’s been fourteen months. We haven’t lost a bird to predators. I don’t know if that’s because the raccoons in our specific hollow are lazy, because Hank’s presence near the coop deters something, or because we got lucky. I’m not going to tell you chicken wire is fine based on one data point. But I’m also not going to pretend we immediately ripped it out and replaced it. It’s still there. We’ll probably replace it eventually. Or we won’t, and something will happen, and then we will.

The eXtension Poultry website, run by land-grant universities, has straightforward information on predator-proofing that isn’t trying to sell you anything. It aligns with what Sarah told us. Hardware cloth is the correct answer. Chicken wire is the budget answer. You get to decide which one you’re making.

What I’d tell someone starting from zero: build the coop small enough to do right the first time. Ours is 8×10 feet, which was manageable for two people without a lot of construction experience. Ben did most of the framing while I held things and handed him the right screws, and we finished the shell in a weekend. A publication like Mother Earth News has free coop plans in various sizes if you want something to work from rather than improvising. We improvised. It worked, but having a plan would have saved us from rebuilding one wall that turned out to be six inches too short for the roost height we wanted.

The one thing I’m confident about, after twelve chickens and two full seasons: the coop matters less than the management. Dry bedding, locked door every night, fresh water that isn’t frozen solid in winter. A mediocre coop with good daily habits beats a beautiful coop with neglect every time.