The winds last night were nothing short of epic. I expected the Nazgul to swarm down and begin tearing the roof from the house, screeching their intent to cause mayhem and destruction. At one point, I was actually up with my revolver and my flashlight, trying to figure out who was breaking in to the house. No one. Just the wind.
It died down a little this morning, but just enough for us to go out and empty all the tumbleweeds out of the coop and watch the snow start to come in. No construction today. But the coop held.
I got a comment from our old neighbor Ken, whose goat barn is the inspiration for my chicken coop. He used shipping flats - like the ones a snowmobile comes on, for his goat barn, but it's the same principle.
Ken and Diana raise chickens and goats. You can find their farm and their blog at http://www.lilbitfarms.com/. They're who we call when we need advise, and there's some good stuff here. Here's his comments below:
hey Joaquin this is Ken. We miss ya guys being neighbors. The coop is a great idea. It's fun to see what you can put together with a pile of scraps... plus it just saves you a ton of money. Your gonna like having a dirt floor. I wish now that I would have cut the floor out and buried chicken wire around it to keep critters from digging in. We started off buying wood chips which turned out to be a waste of money and it was harder to clean. Now we just get the wheel barrel and find some dry sand to shovel into it. The sand makes it so much easier to clean. We still use wood chips in their nesting boxes though. We bought a hard steel big cat litter scoop off ebay for $10 bucks that also serves as a scraper for the frozen turds lol. It makes it easy to clean cuz the sand falls right through the scoop. We do spray the dirt with permetherine every time we refill it to take care of any lice or bugs that a wild critter might have left behind. It never fails though and seems every winter our hens get lice and we have to treat them all. The pallets are a cool idea. You can shove straw hay in the middle of them if you wanted to insulate it but I wouldn't seal the hay in just in case mold starts then you can just pull it out. We found they like alfalfa hay and it's good protein for them especially in the cold months. Chickens are pretty tough in the cold though. We babied ours before but this year were not heating them (I've read that the heat could be bad because it creates humidity and the temp changes from outside to inside weakens them) Plus our coop is pretty full so they have plenty of friends to huddle with. We bought some cheapy heated dog bowls from big R so we don't have to battle frozen water anymore. We read a lot that those $50 heated metal bases break all the time. As for the roosts...2X4's work the best. We re-designed the roosts in our coop so many times to get it right and it was pretty frustrating. They all love to roost up high and the dominant ones will fight for their spot so we tried to get them close to the same level. You don't want them pooping on each other either tho. I've seen some people just use a step ladder style roosting wall spaced out so the hens below aren't in the poop drop zone. If your looking for a cheaper roof we never found anyone selling shingles cheap so for our barn we ended up using roll roofing. First we nailed down tar paper then spread on this black tar stuff and rolled the roofing out on it and it's held up great even in these winds. That was the cheaper way to go even though it still cost about 100 bucks and it don't look the best (kind of wavy) but the goats don't care how it looks ; ) I'm no great builder myself and half the time I just piece these things together with no plan but most the time it works out. I hope this helps give ya any ideas from what we have encountered and if you ever need any chicken health tips were here for ya. It looks great what you got going. I need to rebuild a coop that didn't turn out the best and I'm thinking pallets now for sure. Hope the winds stop soon and let ya get back at it. Take care man.
Like I said when I started this blog, it isn't going to end with construction. I'll go through the post construction preparation for occupants, then the occupants themselves and this will become the Mountain Shadows Ranch chicken blog. What's Mountain Shadows? It's our Alaskan Malamute kennel, which you can visit here: http://mountainshadowsmalamutes.com.
While I'm held up because of the weather, I'll probably post some of my other ideas for the coop - like solar power for brood lamps and lighting. That will come in a future post.
Feel free to comment or add your experiences in the Disqus box below each post! I welcome all ideas.
