Free Guide · Building a Better Chicken Run
Ten years standing, through weather, goats and heavy use, and the maintenance so far has been a hammer and a few nails.
How do you build a predator-proof chicken run? Heavy gauge sheet mesh on the outside walls, overlapped and U-nailed, carried on beams and continued well below ground so nothing can dig under. A mesh roof on top for foxes and birds of prey. The floor can then be bare earth, because the security is all in the perimeter.
After the Chicken City tour went up, most of the questions I got were about the build itself. What is the mesh. How do the walls attach. How deep does the wire go. Do you do it all at once.
One honest caveat before we start: this was built over ten years ago and I did not film any of it. I wish I had, and I cannot go back. What I can do is show you where every part of it has ended up after a decade, which is arguably the more useful thing anyway. I have done essentially no maintenance in that time.
Watch
Every join, up close
Inside and outside the roof, the wall fixings, the buried mesh and the chicken house base, all filmed at the ten year mark.
The roof
Wire mesh, rolled out across the top of the whole structure. The wooden beams you can see are not holding a roof up in the usual sense, they are simply there to support the mesh.
Where one sheet of mesh meets the next, they are joined with fencing ring clips. There is the tiniest bit of movement at a join and nothing more. It is a lightweight roof and it is more than sturdy enough that nothing gets in and nothing gets out.
The detail I would most recommend copying
How the roof is finished at the edge. The mesh is fixed onto the top of the wall structure, then a second plate of timber goes on over it, sandwiching the mesh between the two. It gives a neat edge, and in ten years the wire has never curled or peeled back anywhere. A raw mesh edge is what fails first on most builds.
One ongoing job, and it is a plant not a build problem. The passion fruit is forever trying to climb onto the roof, and I keep pulling it back down. Once a vine gets on top of the mesh you cannot control it, it will damage the roof over time, and you cannot reach the fruit anyway. Keep the roof naked.
Also on the channel
Why build it this way at all
Before you spend the money, this is the case for an integrated run: what the roof, the shared rooms and the rotation actually buy you.
The external walls
Fine gauge, heavy duty sheet mesh. Industrial stuff, the sort you would expect to see somewhere far less pleasant than a garden. Sheets are overlapped by two squares for extra security and fixed on with U-nails. At the top they attach to the roof beam, at the bottom to a cross beam that edges everything off.
And then the part you cannot see, which is the part that matters. That mesh does not stop at ground level. It continues down into the earth. If you dig at the base of a wall you will find it still going. A fox that decides to dig its way in hits wire instead of soil.
This is the single thing I would not compromise on. Wire that stops at the ground is not a predator-proof wall, it is a fence with an invitation underneath it.
Ten years of maintenance, in full
Occasionally a U-nail works loose and a panel bows out by about a finger's width. I notice it, get a hammer, put another U-nail in, and it is flush again.
That is the entire list. And the cause is usually not weather, it is the goats: they love scratching themselves against the panels, and Remy in particular has a favourite corner that has needed re-nailing more than once.
The internal walls, and where to save money
The room dividers are also sheet mesh and also U-nailed to the posts, but in a much wider gauge. Put the two side by side and the difference in weight is obvious.
That is deliberate, and it has two advantages. It is cheaper. And a wider gauge is far easier to use as a trellis, which is exactly what these walls have become, including for my espaliered apples.
If you are cutting costs anywhere in a build like this, cut them here. An internal wall only has to keep chickens in one room and out of another. It is doing no predator work at all, so it does not need to be predator-rated. People often ask whether I used hardware cloth on the outside: I have not used it anywhere in this build, but if there were a sensible place for it, the room dividers would be it.
Water, and the tap I would install first
There is a tap plumbed into the middle of the courtyard, roughly the centre of the whole garden, with a hose and a splitter running off it and a misting line for hot days.
I use it every single day, and not mostly for plants. Filling water bowls. Cleaning feeders. Hosing the compost bins down. Trying to run a hose in from outside, through gates, with animals underfoot and hoping nobody escapes, would be miserable. Put a tap inside.
There is also drip irrigation throughout, feeding all the garden beds, and it runs off the solar panel you can see on the roof. In summer it comes on most days. In the cooler months it never runs at all, because it is very wet here. Hand watering these rooms would be an enormous job and I would not have the time for it.
A small unexpected benefit: the chickens love drinking straight from the drippers. Not that we have ever needed it, but it is a spare water source, and it is nice that they have options.
Outside the run there is a sink made from an old pallet and a sink someone put out in hard rubbish, plumbed in. It looks a mess and it is extremely useful.
The floor is bare earth, on purpose
No wire. No concrete. Straw on top, horse bedding pellets under that, and if you keep digging you reach the red clay that is our soil here.
I want it that way. The chickens can scratch and dig as much as they like with nothing underneath to stop them, and worms can move up from the soil into the litter, which is what builds the ecosystem in there. Even the raised bed in the middle of the courtyard is open bottomed, so everything can travel up and down through it. I find that far easier than growing in pots.
None of that needs floor protection, because the perimeter already handles it. Deal with security at the boundary and you never have to deal with it underfoot.
The chicken house, and its one weak point
The chicken house has no floor either. Bare earth, same reasoning. Plenty of people floor theirs; mine does not need it because the outside is already fortified.
But the house walls are timber panels rather than sheet mesh, which means they had nothing running down into the soil to stop something digging under them. So we attached mesh to the outside base of the chicken house and buried it into the ground. Anything that tries to dig in there hits wire, exactly like the perimeter. The whole boundary is now continuous with no weak spot. Touch wood, nothing has ever tried.
A build like this is a lot of digging, a lot of concrete and a lot of days that end with you too tired to cook. Which is roughly the entire market for hot chips, and there is a reason the chicken salt lives permanently next to our oven.
Alyce's Favourite
For the dinner after a build day
Alyce's Organic No-Chicken Chicken Salt
Organic, and made for chips, wedges and roast potatoes. No chicken in it, which seems only fair.
Shop the No-Chicken Chicken SaltAll at once, or in stages?
We built the whole thing in one go, and there are real economies of scale in that. You pour the concrete for every support beam in one session. You set up the entire irrigation system as one job. You roll the roof mesh across the lot at once.
But you absolutely do not have to. Build the chicken house and the main courtyard first, then add rooms as budget and time allow. The design takes that perfectly well, and if doing it all at once is what is stopping you starting, start smaller.
What goes wrong
Wire that stops at ground level
The most common and most costly mistake. Foxes dig. If the mesh does not continue below the surface, the wall is decorative.
A raw mesh edge on the roof
Unsandwiched wire curls and peels back over the years. Two plates of timber with the mesh between them is a five minute decision that has held for a decade.
Timber walls with nothing buried under them
A solid-walled chicken house feels secure and is the easiest place to leave a gap, because there is no mesh running down into the soil. Attach some and bury it.
Letting a vine onto the roof
Once it is up there you cannot manage it, it will work at the mesh, and the fruit is out of reach. Keep pulling it back down.
Paying for predator-rated mesh on internal walls
Money spent where nothing is trying to get in. Wider gauge is cheaper and makes a better trellis.
Frequently asked questions
How deep should chicken run wire go underground?
Mine continues down well below the surface, and the principle matters more than any exact figure: a digging predator has to hit wire before it hits soft ground.
Do you need concrete under a chicken run?
No, and I would argue against it. Bare earth lets the chickens dig and lets worms move up into the litter. Secure the perimeter instead.
What mesh is best for a chicken run?
Heavy duty fine gauge sheet mesh on anything a predator could reach, overlapped and U-nailed. A cheaper wider gauge is fine for internal dividers.
Does a chicken house need a floor?
Not if the perimeter is secure. Mine is bare earth, with mesh attached to the outside base of the house and buried, so nothing can dig under the timber walls.
How much maintenance does a build like this need?
In ten years, occasionally hammering a U-nail back in after a goat has scratched against a panel. That is genuinely all.
Building your own version of this?
I have been refining Chicken City for over ten years and I share what works, what failed, and what I would do differently. Come along for the rest of it.
More from Chicken City
The best chicken coop design is the argument for spending this money in the first place.
How to stop your chicken coop smelling is what you do with that bare earth floor once the build is done.
How to protect plants from chickens turns those internal mesh walls into a trellis without losing the plants.
Chicken City, the details has the layout and rough plans to work from.
Watch next
What it looks like finished and full
The full tour of everything this structure now holds, room by room, a decade after it went up.
