Customer Reviews

How to Build Animal Housing: 60 Plans for Coops, Hutches, Barns, Sheds, Pens, Nestboxes, Feeders, Stanchions, and Much More

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I purchased this book and quickly found that it is basically a catalog of plans that are available free online from USDA and others. The web links for the plans are printed right in the back. If you spend some time surfing, you'll find much of the useful information (and more) without purchasing the book.

There is helpful information in the planning section, and some basic tools and methods to get started. It would also be a helpful book for those newly transplanted city-folks to read prior to jumping into raising livestock.

If you have experience with livestock or construction, you can find all you need online. If you are planning your first projects, this will be helpful.

I was hoping for a book of plans that included small, simple to build shelters for just a few goats and chickens. The plans included were large and the building instructions were not detailed enough for beginners to do themselves (without a seperate how-to-book). If I could have looked through it first, I would not have bought it.

I was looking for a book on how to build satisfactory chicken and duck housing. This book has a couple of plans for chicken coops, but not enough to buy the book. Why did I give it four stars then? Because the book is designed to give you building plans for various types of live-stock (pigs, hourses, cows, chickens, goats, rabbits, and others). The book does give you 60 plans like it says it does, but there is never more than 2 and at the most three on any specific animal.

This book does have a lot of good information in it beyond the housing plans. It has minimal spacing for your animals, safety and health of your animals, plus it has lots of good pieces of advice throughout the book that has been picked up over 30 plus years. If your like me and are looking to build housing for a specific type of live stock then this is probably not the best book for you (for chickens I would suggest "Poultry House Construction" by Michael Roberts). However, if your looking to build housing for various breeds of live-stock then this book would be a wise purchase. However, a materials list would have been nice (not enough books give them).

This is a great book for ideas. It falls very short on important details.

This book is about building animal shelters, but none of these plans
have a listing of the parts needed. This is doubly important because
these are complicated plans. I would like to build the rabbit house,
but now I am having to approximate what I need. The author needs to
remember that someone wanting to use this book might live 20 miles away
from the hardware store.

I really liked this book. It has a lot of good plans, from simple chicken coops to full-blown small barns. It has super references, is well-laid out, and especially for the small homesteader it also has good general information. I belong to several homesteading sites and have highly recommended it to that group.

I was a bit disappointed to find the plans in this book are USDA plans from the 1970s and were not in my view very creative or innovating or interesting. The rabbit house was just a shed of small cages, aimed at someone raising rabbits for food, I suppose, and not in any way pleasant for the rabbits.

This book has a great array of shelters. I was looking for a couple types of shelters... chicken coop and horse run-ins and found ideas to match just what I needed for both!

This book is one of the best I have seen in detailed diagrams & information on building housing for livestock. We are currently building a 3 sided shelter for our alpacas right now using this book as a reference. The book is chuck full of valuable information we would have never thought of and were glad to know before starting to build. Another great thing about the book is that it has such a wide variety of types of buildings. It is a great book to get you started in providing housing for your animals.

If you're a small-scale farmer interested in building the best pen, coop, hatch, or shelter for your animal, whether it be a pig, chicken or horse, then How to Build Animal Housing is for you: it offers tips on how to evaluate the housing needs of numerous animals and shows how to adapt existing barns and structures as well as how to build from scratch. Chapters blend discussions of animal behavior with surveys of safety issues and needs to provide a practical manual backed by the author's 20+ years of farming experience. A 'must' for any who want an all-in-one volume centered on animal housing needs.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

I was surprised about how much information was packed into this book. Everything from screw to nail types to how to do just about everything when it comes to building pens. I was however disappointed that it had only one or two plans for bird pens. I was hoping for many more and was not really looking for a book that told me how to build pig pens buy hey it is very informative.

--Glenn