We have 9 chooks - 1 isa brown from the CCC (we got 3 chicks but 2 were roosters), 4 Barnvelders and 4 Lavendar Aracunas. The Aracunas & Barnvelders give us 3 eggs/day between the 4 of them, and we get 1 from the isa/day. The Aracunas lay blue eggs which are size "small". DH & DS collect on average 7 eggs/day.
We got our chook shed from someone getting rid of their avery and we clad it with wood and put a decent roof on it. It's actually 2 stories and we put the cats in there over summer - they keep the mice population down and enjoy the freedom. They are bossed by the chooks!

If you want to start up cheaply, next hard rubbish collection get a dog kennel - put it on some legs and there's your chook shed. You can put a perch in there easily. To get the chooks, go to a battery farm and you can pick up 16-mth old chooks for around $2-3. These will give you initially 2 eggs/day for about a week, then go off the lay for about a fortnight or so while they get used to freedom and their new diet, then you'll get 1 egg/day for about another 18 months or so. Very rewarding, watching them learn all about insects and scratching for yummy goodness. And their first dust bath!!!! (and learning how to walk, and watching their feathers grow back).

If it's cold, the egg production may slow, but you can get around this by giving the chooks warm feed of a morning. Pellets with a bit of warm water will do nicely!

Christy - our lab loves chook poo too, and we also get projectile poo as well as vomit from over-indulgence.

Chook poo tea is brillo for the garden if you can't be bothered putting it into your compost heap to age. We don't eat a lot of eggs (something to do with having no hotplates) and found that 1 carton / eggs sold per week for around $3 made us back the cost of chook feed. Now our chooks pay for the dog, cat & ****atiel feed too