Nesting Boxes for Chickens – How to Build Chicken Nest Boxes

I'm going to show you how to make a DIY set of nesting boxes like these. Today I'm going to show you how to make four nesting boxes using one piece of plywood. I went to Lowe's and I bought me a 4×8 and I didn't even have to rent a truck or bring a big van.
I was able to get it all cut at Lowe's for free into pieces like this, so I could fit them directly into my trunk in a small car. If you are going to do cuts at home, make sure you always wear some protective sunglasses. It will keep the sawdust out of your eyes. The panel I bought is a 4×8, which means it's 4 foot long. I ended up having it cut to 13 inches, so our boxes should be 13 by 13 and 13. Right here I've already measured a 1/2 and a half inch piece, so that could be ourdividers and the nesting boxes and our corners.

Corner Clamps

So we're going to go ahead and get that cut now I got my straight guide that I'm going to clamp down. That way, it doesn't move on us. So we're going to get this one cut first. Let's go. Got our first panel. We're going to need a total of 5. I found these corner clamps–it's a 90 degree corner clamp on Amazon. They were like super cheap–£15 bucks or so–and they've become really helpful with doing this sort of thing. You just clamp it to your corner like this.

How to Build a Chicken Nesting Box

It holds it at a 90 degree angle, it holds it still for you and then I'm able to do my drilling and put the screw on while that's holding it together. So we're going to do that now, and I'm just going to predrill a hole right here and put my screw in.
Another one at the top here, Okay, and then we go to this other side over here and do the same. I've already got my clamps on there, so we're just going to go ahead and screw that in. Take these off, and that's how convenient these little clamps are–that it holds your whatever you're working on straight and in 90 degrees. We're going to go ahead and do the back now.
This one here is already 4 feet wide, 13 inches tall. That should fit right there. Again, we're going to use our little clamps. These clamps are also great for when you're working alone, you don't have someone to hold the wood for you. Two screws. This thing started to shape really quickly. We got our back, our floor, our ants.

Let's see that would be our top. We have ourdividers. So on this one here we're going to make four nesting boxes. 1 square foot, 12 inches wide, 12 inches deep. Guess what we're going to use? Our little corner clamps again, I'm telling you these little corner clamps, game changer.

We got them from Amazon–$15 bucks. I'll leave the link in the description if you want to try these out. Alright, here we're just going to do a couple screws across the top. We'll do one in the middle here just for good measure. These screws.

It says you don't need to predrill. I always like to predrill holes just to prevent our wood from splitting when you put the screw in. We got one big box, but we're going to put thedividers in to give us four nesting boxes. So we're going to go to about. So they have a perfect 12 inch width. So we're going to go right there so it could hold it in place.

Our little corner clamps. Look at that. Perfect. We have our four boxes there. The only thing I need to do is add a lip here to hold the nesting material and a little root bar so the chickens can jump up there and then decide which one they're going to go into. At low, I had the guy cut me a three inch piece, so very minimal pieces that I had to cut here myself. Just do the same thing.

The Root Bar

If you don't got the equipment at home, that's going to be our lip right there like this. Now I just need to go cut what's actually going to be the root bar. I don't have that ready, so we're going to go get that cut now. The bar that will go across the front, there, the roost, is going to be four foot wide, just like the nesting boxes, and that's going to be our two pegs that are going to hold the bar in the middle, And then that's going to be our bar that's going to go across the way, just like this.

Nesting Boxes – The Nesting Pads

I think that's a wrap. I think we got it all done. We got four nesting boxes and this is ready for our hands to come investigate as I was finishing this project right now. literally it just came in the mouth. We got our nesting pads that we like to use in all of our nesting boxes. We get these from Myfairichicken.com. We'll leave the link in the description below, along with our review video that we made of these guys. You can click here or it'll be in the description down there.
You see, she's already checking it out. She's like, hey, is this a new spot for me to land? Hey girl, you better not be lying there right now, because we haven't set it in the chickencoop yet. It's still on our building table. I'm going to say she approves of the new nesting boxes. Well, that wraps it up for today's video. You guys, thank you for joining me on this build.