Best location for my chicken coop

[yorick]

Hi.

I'm in the early stages of the redesign of our side yard to accomodate the chicken coop. I'd like to get some opinions/suggestions about my plans. Below is an overhead diagram that shows the coop in the upper-right of the yard. Any comments, suggestions?

The corner where I plan to put the coop gets the most sun. I figure this will help to heat the coop during the cool winter. We live in Northern California and it does not get too cold in the winter (50s at night), so I think heating naturally during the day then good insulation should be enough.

What do you guys think?

 

[Tala]

Do you keep a rooster? You might want to think about crowing location vs. your bedroom's location. Don't know which end of the house your bedroom is on, or if it even bothers you, or if you even have a roo, but just my $0.02 on that.

In Cali I would think you'd be more worried about keeping chickens COOL in the summer rather than warm in the winter.
I would put them where they would get shade in the summer, because chickens can handle cold a WHOLE lot better than they can handle the heat. 50 degree winters aren't going to phase them AT ALL they won't care if the coop is in the sun, but I'd worry in the summer.
Also, there will probably be more bugs around the trees than out in the sunny area. Or maybe your chickens would enjoy to eat the fruit that drops from one of the trees?

 

[ksct]

I agree... if you have a rooster, i'd try to keep it away from your bedroom window. ours isn't 'close' but we hear him @ 4am every morning. usually (now) i'll wake up and then go back to sleep. But we still wake up. I just like them closer to the house for us because we can still see them if we look out the window. I wouldn't want them where we originally thought, further from our house.

Also agreeing to the shade factor. We have some shade on one end of our enclosed run. They use it a lot. So if you keep your coop and run where you have it in your drawing, i'd make sure you have a good amount of shade. tha'ts also why we put them relatively close to our hedge row.

this is our coop. the top is open (meaning chicken wire covers it but no solid cover) and you can see the 'lean to' on the left of the pic. this provides a good amount of shade. we enclosed 2 of the 3 sides with 2x4 to make sure the wind doesn't hit them directly and so that it helps provide more shade. I didn't want to do this initally but i'm glad we did. We have sand in the run (now that all the grass is gone) and they love it in the corner of that area because the sand is cool when it's hot out.

BTW - this pic has the tin we put up for this winter, it's to block the snow and wind. (we are on a hill that gets lake effect winds and we don't want them buried in snow or freezing from the wind. we put it up on both sides and will take it down in the spring. Acutally DH has put a large tarp over the roof to stop the rain and snow as well. I'm not a fan because it's not as bright in there for them but we had some nasty rain and wind the other day so it'll work for the winter.

anyway, i hope this helps too. enjoy the birds! they're GREAT!!!!

 

[Nostalchic]

It's sometimes difficult to do this while maintaining the aesthetics, but we've found that there was enormous benefit to positioning the barn and coop so that you take advantage of the low south sun in winter and have a protected wall against the prevailing winds/weather (also in winter); and with an overhang that blocks direct sun into the coop in summer, and takes advantage of those prevailing winds (nice breezes for ventilation) in the summer. It's not always possible on smaller properties, but if you can incorporate those things, it will make the coop much more comfortable for all.