We’ve had cat castles, stylish crates for dogs, and even houses for chooks, and now we have one for ducks too! Do you want a large and spacious house for your ducks? Then this cable spool duck house just might be the one you are looking for!
Nowadays, more people are raising chicken at home as a hobby or to cultivate their eggs. If you don’t have a few chickens of your own by now, you probably know someone who does.
In general, however, ducks lay larger eggs. Some breeds of ducks even lay eggs for a consistently long period of time. But they’ll need a good place to nest to lay good eggs.
And this duck house is so easy, so simple, you can build it yourself!
This cable spool duck house is inexpensive if you can access old and unused cable spools. Aside from the spool, you will also need several timber slats that you can have for free or at a very low price by choosing reclaimed timber or old pallets.
Of course, this cable spool house can also be for other pets. The cable spool can also turn into a chicken coop or even a dog house.
Is this going to be your next project?
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Building a Cable Spool Duck House
Materials
- Spool
- Wood (reclaimed)
- Galvanized Drywall screws
- Filler
- Paint
- Varnish
- Door Hardware (Hinges, Handle, Latch)
Tools
- Circular Saw
- Jigsaw
- Cordless Drill
- Hole Saw Drill Bit (two sizes)
- Chisel (or Screwdriver)
- Vise Grips
- Socket Wrench
- Sander
- Paint Brush
Instructions
Disassemble spool
Having never played with them before, I was pleasantly surprised at the elegance of the engineering of these spools: an enormously heavy and rugged apparatus held together by only six bolts! This massive housing will turn into our cable spool duck house.
Granted, these are bolts to be reckoned with: 32″ long, steel. They sit spaced between fourteen curved slats an inch and a half thick and about six inches wide, all resting in a recessed slot routed into each of the round sides of the spool, to define the inner “barrel.”
So all you need to do to take the spool apart is remove the bolts for your cable spool duck house. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, it may very well be, if your spool didn’t have too rough a life before it found its way to you. In that case, all you have to do is sit the spool on its “wheels,” render either the nut or the bolt head stationary with some vice grips or a wrench (and perhaps a friend to wield it, unless you have an enormous wingspan), and loosen from the other end with your socket wrench.
The slats will slide out and fall as the bolts loosen. Then all you have to worry about is crushing your toes or fingers or skull or fine china or small pets when the last bolt gives way and the heavy round chunks succumb to gravity. But if only a little rust is present, plan on using a great deal more profanity and other rust-battling measures.
Make new bolt holes
At each end of the bolts, there’s a “top hat” washer (but a curved one… perhaps more of a “derby?”) about two inches across, nestled in a deep recess. For this design, we need to move the bolts from the inner slot to the outer edge, which means we need new holes for our washers. Since these are old metal parts, you want them removed to make a safe cable spool duck house.
I figured out where to drill by drawing lines from the center point of the round, across an existing bolt hole, and out near the edge.
I cut a shallow hole using a 2″ hole saw, then a deeper one with the same center point using a 1-1/2″ hole saw.
The wood between the hole saw cuts were easily chiseled away (I used a screwdriver, not a chisel – don’t tell, okay?) until the washer had a comfortable place to sit on your cable spool duck house.
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