Chicken coops can be made from almost anything - revamping an old shed or camping trailer, using scrap lumber, PVC pipes, 50 gallon barrels, tarps, kits, and the list goes on. Wood is the most commonly used material for coop building. Depending on the size of your coop, buying new lumber can get expensive.
I was able to find a couple of businesses which sell used or scrap lumber and this worked nicely for my 4'x 8' coop. I even found some used windows and a couple sets of unused shingle there. If you decide to build your coop with used lumber, be prepared to pull out some nails, cut out some broken pieces, and to be creative with what you find. It takes extra time and TLC to build a coop using "recycled" or used wood - but I found the extra time well worth it in how much money I saved!
The suggested size for chicken nest boxes is 15" wide, 15" high and 11 1/8" (see picture for example). This can vary to a certain extent. My nest boxes are about 2" smaller than this and work just fine. You can fill your boxes with straw or place some type of padding down on the bottom so the eggs won't crack when they lay. I noticed that they tend to kick and scratch a lot of straw out of the boxes so I stapled a piece of padding onto the bottom.
I started off with 8 chickens and made a nest box for each chicken. It turns out they all used the same 2 nest boxes for laying eggs! I've even seen 3 chickens in the same nest box at the same time - therefore, you don't need to make too many boxes. They tend to gravitate toward the same box. If you have a big flock - you'll need to make more. In some of the links I've provided, there are some excellent pictures of nest boxes, diagrams, and "how-to" instructions for building nest boxes. A view of a couple of my nest boxes is pictured above.
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