What “pallet coop” means on this plan, and what it doesn’t
Search for a chicken coop made from pallets and most of what comes back stands whole pallets on end as walls or lays them flat as a floor. Almost none of those guides say anything about what the wood is or what it can carry.
This plan does something different, and it’s in the name: framed in real lumber, clad in free board. The posts, joists, studs, rafters and roof are the same as the 6x8 walk-in shed coop, stick for stick. The pallet board goes on the outside of the walls, and that’s the only place it goes.
The reason is simple. A span table works because a grade stamp tells you what a board is. Pallet lumber has no grade stamp. It’s bought to a load spec, usually from low-grade mixed hardwood, often green, and it’s already been loaded and unloaded more times than anyone recorded. There’s no strength value to look up, so it doesn’t hold anything up. It keeps the rain off a wall that’s already standing.
The plan goes one step further. None of the pallet board is on the inside face of the coop, where the birds breathe over it all night.
It isn’t the cheap option, and here’s the arithmetic
| Design | Skin | Hens | Build time | Materials |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6x8 walk-in shed coop | Lap siding | 7–10 | 30–38 hrs | $2,900–$3,750 |
| 6x8 pallet-clad (this one) | Reclaimed board | 7–10 | 38–50 hrs + ~10 stripping | $2,850–$3,800 |
| 6x8 modern coop | Board-and-batten | 7–10 | 40–52 hrs | $3,600–$4,700 |
Most people build a pallet coop to save money. On this design the saving is close to nothing. The range starts $50 lower than the lap-sided version and ends $50 higher.
The siding goes away. In its place you buy a roll of house wrap and tape, 26 1x4 furring strips, four gallons of penetrating stain, sealant for the joints, three metal-cutting recip blades and cut-resistant gloves. The material list runs to 40 line items against the plain coop’s 31.
Then there’s the labor. The build runs 38 to 50 hours, plus about 10 more stripping pallets before you cut a stud. That’s 30 pallets at roughly twenty minutes each.
So build this for the look. You get a warm, uneven, grey-brown wall that no lumber yard sells, on a frame you can trust. The cost breakdown guide shows where coop money normally goes, and siding was never the biggest line.
Reading the stamp: HT yes, MB no
Wood packaging that crosses a border is marked under ISPM 15, the International Plant Protection Convention’s standard. A real mark has a border, the IPPC wheat-ear symbol, a two-letter country code, a producer number and a treatment code. Anything outside that border is the mill’s own stencil and tells you nothing.
There are only a few treatment codes:
- HT, heat treated. The wood core held at 56 C for 30 minutes. Nothing added. This is the one you want.
- DH, dielectric heating. Heat again, delivered by microwave. Fine.
- MB, methyl bromide. A toxic fumigant. Leave these pallets where they are, and don’t burn them either.
- SF, sulfuryl fluoride. Another fumigant, much rarer. Treat it like MB.
MB isn’t just a thing of the past. The Montreal Protocol phase-out still allows methyl bromide for quarantine and pre-shipment use, and wood packaging is still being fumigated with it. The plan is honest that no one has measured what the residue means for reused wood in animal housing. It isn’t claiming MB boards are poisonous. It’s saying there’s a safe alternative in almost every pile, so there’s no reason to take the doubtful one.
And no stamp at all is normal. ISPM 15 only governs international shipments. US Customs and USDA state plainly that pallets in domestic circulation have no treatment or marking requirement. An unstamped pallet is usually plain, untreated wood.
The stamp is the easy check. These are the ones that reject pallets
ISPM 15 itself says the treatment isn’t meant as ongoing protection from contamination. The mark means insects were killed at the mill. It says nothing about where the pallet has sat since. A correctly stamped HT pallet from behind a fish market is still a pallet from behind a fish market.
The plan runs its checks in this order, and only then looks for the stamp:
- Wet or mouldy. Anything soggy, anything that smells like a cellar, anything with visible mould stays at the curb.
- Stained. A spill, an oily patch or a smell you can’t place means no. Wood is porous, and you’ll never know you got it all out.
- Soft. Press every board with a thumbnail. If it dents, it’s firewood.
- Too thin. Nothing under 3/8 inch, which is the minimum thickness for wood siding in IRC Table R703.3(1).
- Painted or branded. A blue or red pallet, or one with a pool company’s name on it, is rental property, not scrap. Penn State Extension says so plainly. Taking it is theft.
Always ask before you take anything. Pallets behind a business usually belong to someone, and asking normally gets you pointed at the free pile.
One more honest note. No extension service anywhere endorses reclaimed pallet wood for animal housing. The plan’s position is conservative because of that: dry, clean boards only, outside face only, on a ventilated wall.
Why the wall behind the boards does the real work
On a normal coop, lap siding is the weather barrier. Pallet boards of random thickness can’t do that job, so on this plan they don’t have to. House wrap is the barrier, and the boards hang 3/4 inch in front of it on vertical furring as a ventilated rainscreen.
That gap is also what makes the boards last. The USDA Forest Products Laboratory exposed untreated boards roughly the size of a pallet deck board on a test fence for twenty-two years. Above ground, red oak lasted more than twenty years. The same red oak built into a joint that trapped water lasted six. The difference was whether water could get out.
So the plan’s durability strategy is drainage, not species. Seal every cut end, back-coat every board, and use a penetrating stain or oil rather than paint. A film coat peels unevenly on boards of different ages and traps water behind it. The materials guide covers the other wood choices on a coop.
Same flock, same air, same predator rules
Under the cladding this is the 6x8 walk-in shed coop’s shell, so everything about the birds is identical. 37 square feet of coop for 7 to 10 hens, a 60 square foot run, 100 inches of roost and three nest boxes.
The 3.3 square feet of permanent vent is a continuous open strip along the top of the back wall. The plan stops the cladding short of it on purpose. Clad that wall tight to the plate and you’ve sealed the coop’s only permanent air.
The run takes 129 feet of quarter-inch hardware cloth and a buried apron. Don’t swap in pallet slats for mesh on the run. University of Kentucky Extension documents in ID-245 that a least weasel gets through half-inch openings, and a gap between slats is bigger than that. The predator-proofing guide has the full routine.
What this design deliberately does not do
It doesn’t use pallet wood for anything structural, and it doesn’t put it inside the coop.
It doesn’t save you much money. It saves you a look you can’t buy.
It isn’t a quick build. Five to seven days plus the stripping, rated Intermediate. And it’s framed to published span tables, not a stamped engineering design. Specs and the preview PDF are free on this page. The full 49-page plan book, including the sourcing and cladding layout pages, is $4.99 on Etsy.