This is how we design our chicken coops.

For weeks now I’ve been working my butt off. Sixteen hours a day in SketchUp. Our models have to be brought into digital form in order to optimise the cutting plans and, above all, the material orders. Since the cut list later generated by SketchUp is accurate to the millimetre, you really need to put some effort into it. The visualisation is almost secondary. Above all, you must not overlook standard retail thicknesses of plywood (for example 9 instead of 8). Otherwise, you’ll spend another 3 days adjusting all the cuts ;)




After that, you take a look at your cut list and order list. Depending on the settings, it is accurate to one hundredth of a unit... and you realise, for example, that the one flange on part D of the nesting box is 1 cm too large to still fit on the fourth plywood sheet. Too much waste. That means it would make sense to shorten the roof by 0.5 cm on both sides.




Your creative ideas about how large the roof overhang should be, just based on gut feeling, fall apart when you finally calculate the pallet size for the freight carrier right at the very end. Damn, why didn’t your gut tell you 2 cm less? And once again you spend a whole day recalculating all the notches.



Then, when in the end everything works out, at least on paper, you get the idea that the overall dimensions of the run could perhaps use one more centimetre in length. And that means you are almost starting over again from the beginning.

This is only a tiny selection of the time-related challenges. It is still a huge amount of fun once you reach a status quo where, for the first time, you finally hand the model over to the renderer and start seeing all your ideas in a beautiful form.

And then come the next 3 weeks ;)