What do you wish you'd done differently with your duck housing?

We are just building our duck area. I've read as many threads as I can find here about various designs and styles.

What do you wish you'd done differently with your duck space? I am thinking in terms of drainage, water management, feed bins, etc.

Our current plan is for a raised floor with an embedded draining 110 gal tub, a bedding box space enclosed, about 4 ft by 3 ft, fenced in with 1/2 inch wire, and a corrugated PCV roof.

Thus is for 3 pekins, females.

Let me know what you WISH you had done!!

Haha, I wish I'd done/was able many things. But we had 2 male and 2 female Pekins in a 8x8 chain-link dog kennel. We have a nesting box in one corner, and 2 black bowls (from TSC, they have several sizes) in another. It stays really really nasty in that corner, but it was worse when we had hay there.
We got rid of the males and now have 15 ducklings with the females. I let them out daily and they have a black tub full of water and several waterers scattered thru the yard for them.

I can't really get a mental pic of your duck house plan, but it sounds nice.

the night pens gahhh ( mine free range during the day)

we left the floors of the pens as grass and after a week the floors were turned to mud.12 years later of letting it air out and grow grass back when it got dirty and going through different techniques of try to keep it clean we are putting the floors as concrete and using wood shaveing for bedding so when the floors are dirty we just rake the shavings away and spray off the concrete

Thanks for your replies. I remember when I had ducks briefly as a teen that they dug up the grass within a couple days so we are going with painted plywood flooring. I guess it will need to be hosed down every few days. We were planning to put some sand and pebbles on top of the plywood to absorb some of the moisture. I'll try to post a sketch of the plan.

Has anyone used the horse stall rubber mats in their duck coop to help manage everything and to be able to take out to clean?

Better drainage, and I would have actually spent the money to build a better house. A TALLER house. I have to crouch down (not just bend over) to get inside it to get eggs.

I tried the horse stall mats once, and let me tell you, once was enough !!! Have you ever tried to lift one of those things by yourself? Mission Impossible if there ever was one. They're like trying to move a small car !!! So I got the bright idea of cutting it half. Thought it'd be easier to haul around. And it was. It was like trying to haul around one half of a small car !!! They're not only heavy, they're awkward and cumbersome too. They don't do anything as far as helping with drainage IMO and since they're made with a type of rubber, if you nick it with a hoe or anything, your ducks will be drawn to that particular spot like ducks to a mud puddle, until they find a way to turn that little nick into another heinous hole in which they can play. On a positive note, they're much easier to lift when they're in a thousand little pieces !!! Which is exactly what it turned into once my geese got a hold of it. As for using any sort of lumber or lumber like material for the floor, my honest opinion is...don't !!! Even if you coat that thing with enough John Deere green or Rustoleum Red, it's still going to absorb, and more importantly, retain, just about every other drop of water that comes across it's path and once it's inside the wood, the only way to get rid of it is to remove it. The wood, that is...no other way around it that I'm aware of. You just have to pull it up, tear it down or light the thing on fire. Case closed. Time to rebuild. Well, before everyone writes me off as a Debbie Downer,
I would like to say that there does happen to be an option that I tend to favor and that is cement. Yep, It's the easiest thing I've found to clean, just hose it off when you hose your ducks off...lol !!! Just kidding. But really, it is the best flooring I've found and believe me, I've think I've just about tried them all...from having river rock hauled in to lay over the 3 cubic feet of sand that I had hauled in just before that only to have to sandwich some heavy duty landscape cloth in between the two of them, so I do speak from some experience. Now it could be that I just had a 'bad experience' with every single one I tried before I tried concrete, but those aren't even odds a loan shark would support so I'm not thinking that's the case. So please don't
saddle me with any expensive amenities for my dear ole' ducklings and ducks. Nope. Just throw me a bag of that $2.90 Quikrete, and I'll show you how to get down to doing some work.

-kim-

P.S. the opinions expressed herein are just that...opinions. They are not rules for which to go by when deciding what works best for you. They're only written to show the misfortune that I've encountered with these particular construction ideas. You may find that for your particular setup they work like a charm. They just didn't work for me, that all I'm trying to say.

I wish I had two entrances as I have to separate the drakes and females. It's a nightmare at the moment!

I have a big shed with a concrete floor. I thought concrete would be perfect with bedding on to, but the shed floods in heavy rain, so they are now up on pallets, pallets are covered by chaff bags covered by bedding. I have renovated in one nesting area, one drake run and a pile of perches for the chickens. I usually only have to hose the front area down, and if something gets too messy I can just take out a chaff bag and put in a new one. About once a month I do full clean out, everything comes out, washed out. Then put back together. I wish id actually thought about it instead of just saying, yeah, they will all just live together, why not?

mightymax said:

..from having river rock hauled in to lay over the 3 cubic feet of sand that I had hauled in just before that only to have to sandwich some heavy duty landscape cloth in between the two of them, so I do speak from some experience.

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Kim your post made me laught out loud!! Thank you so much for sharing your experience!

Can I ask about the section quoted above, why you had to put landscape cloth between the sand and the stone?