building our first coop - have questions! Help!

[daisy40258]

Hello. My husband and I are building our first coop for my girls - when we got them home from McMurray we counted them all and there were 26 - now the other night I counted and somehow there are 28 - I have NO idea how that happened but somehow we now have 28 chicks! very cool to me but we are worried that the coop we are building is not big enough - we have a total mixture of birds, heavies to bantams and some rare's - we are building an 8x8x8 coop and plan to have about 2-300 sqaure feet of run space for them in addition. We live in Minnesota so we get some pretty brutal winters so the girls will most likely be spending the whole season inside the coop. We plan on having plently of roosts and at least 6 nesting boxes. Depending on what the extra chicks turn out to be we could have 4 roos or less. And the rest would be hens.....does this sound like enough room for all of them? I am crazy about all of them already and couldn't stand giving any of them up!! Please let me know your thoughts! Thank you!!

 

[speckledhen]

We-e-e-llll, not really enough room for that many birds unless a good portion of them are bantams. My original coop was 8x8 and I wouldn't put more than maybe 15 standard size chickens in there and that would be tight if they had to spend alot of time inside. Calculate 4 sq ft per standard size chicken and 8x8 gives enough room for 16 chickens. I have 8x20 for about 30 chickens, although my coop could hold maybe 10 more, if I packed them in. Mine, however, freerange most of every day.

 

[justusnak]

I agree with speckled hen....sounds like that space might be too small...unless over half of them are bantys. Even then, if they are cooped up most of the winter....the smaller ones might just get picked/pecked on alot. Is there a chance you can make it larger? Will you be keeping ALL of the roos? Might want to rethink that as well. Depending on how many hens you will have. I have 2 roos per 11 hens. Its working ok, but the girls get pretty bare backed some times...so, I think one roo will have to go, eventually.

 

[daisy40258]

I am pretty sure there will be a battle with the roos if we keep all of them so I am sure that some of them will have to go - we have a roo and a hen phoenix so we would like to keep them and I have a white crested black polish roo that I really awnt to keep- but not sure about the others - we ordered some straight run from McMurray so we are not toally sure about how many roos we have.... so in an 8x8x8 how many birds would you think if there are about 10 full size birds and the rest bantys........thanks!!