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I have not yet had time to speak with the landlady. I will approach her about vents soon though.
I tried on some Vaseline last night on my chickens, and when I came in today all my birds save for the two EEs and one Legbar hen had frostbite. The temperature inside the coop showed -2°C & 78% humidity; both numbers which my chickens and even my CCL rooster had survived with intact combs several nights in a row before. The Vaseline which I had hoped would protect my birds from frostbite seems to have made things worse by moisturizing the combs further than they already were, so I will not use it again on my chickens, ever. My saving grace is that I so afraid of doing an inexperienced, capital mistake that I only put on a thin layer on each bird, so the frostbite didn't go deep into the combs. The surface flesh is greyed instead of purple or black, and does not look swollen; I believe the affected spots will scab and peel off without taking any spikes or wattle with them. I've learned my lesson though; no Vaseline for me and my humid climate @x@
Here's the pictures of the outside coop:
That's the whole shed. The coop is to the right, where lies the frosted window. The drawn duck & flowers on the door is landlady's doing; she's an artist.
Opened the shed door to show the coop door. The coop door is brown on the outside, and painted green on the inside. It's got some stapled and glued a piece of scrap pool liner to keep the bedding inside the coop. The pool liner is new; in previous years it was not there, and boy was it a mess on the floor whenever I checked on my chickens.
The main focus of my family's attention since the late spring of 2018. When a buzzard ate one of my Warrens in late fall of 2017, I looked for ways to fortify the run, and built this with some family members who were happy to lend a hand. Landlady had an open-air run caged all around with a layer of metal fence and chicken hardware warped around dead trees and dug underground; I decided to build a 8' x 16' closed run inside that with a solid roof that would hopefully not buckle under a thick layer of ice and snow. That thing withstood the hellish winter of 2018-2019 where mother nature ultimately dumped close to fourteen feet of snow on our heads for the season, so I call it a success that it's still standing (of course, the snow was regularly shoveled down, but the roof did at one point have close to two feet of snow on it). I'm sorry to say I have no plans to share on BYC for those interested in maybe building a similar structure; this is hand-made to fit landlady's shed. She'd built a second mini-building beside the shed for a pony she once had, so we had to connect the shed, the horse shed and the closed run all together under two roofs. Tinkering around that took the entire summer. The run and connecting roof are covered by plastic sheets and three tarpaulins to keep the harsh winds at bay. Note the wood shims firmly screwed into the facing plastic sheet and tarpaulin; this is to keep storm gales from tearing up the sheets during a blizzard. The Tarpaulin also keeps the accumulating ice and snow from spilling into the run and damaging its hardware cloth - I hadn't yet come across BYC threads that said to not use chicken wire, so that's what it's currently covered with u_u Said Tarpaulin is hung on hooks that, in the summer, host a net that covers the entire open-air run and keeps flying predators at bay. I lost no chicks this summer.
The open-air run was tinkered with this year; the height of the hardware cloth was raised to keep hens from potentially flying over the fence to go free range, since we have foxes and raccoons prowling around at dusk, and buzzards on the lookout from trees. Pardon the poor-looking door; it's next on a long list of updates to do on this chicken coop.
I couldn't get a picture of the inside of the closed run. The handle of the door that links the coop to the run broke in my hand, so that, too, needs fixing. The window had too much frost to allow me to take a shot from within the coop.
The water bucket is taken out of the coop every evening to avoid a rise in humidity during the night, no worries. I've never taken the water bucket outside in the run during winter before, as I had no protected run or ways to keep the water warm then. In summer time I change all water buckets for DIY water bottles with poultry nipples, to keep the water clean and fresh. The coop usually has four of these bottles; two inside the coop itself and two outside in the run.
@aart - yes, I've had a successfully protected run since this fall. Last year we hadn't had time to cover the roofed run before snow & rain rolled in and iced it over, but this time we beat mother nature at the clock so we're good to go ^^
