Okay, I know this has been asked before, but I wanted to make sure nothing had changed in the few years between posts!
We live in Arizona and I was going to make my coop out of wood - make it look like an old west saloon (I got the idea from LilBizzy's chicken coop plans), with the plan of, by the time I have all the animals we'll be acquiring in the next year, it would like like a small western town. We were going to do cement footers.
I sat down with my dad y'day to discuss it, though, and he brought up the idea of building it out of cinder blocks, which means I have to get creative with some painting to still make it look like an old west town! But I wanted to check out why I had never heard of cinder blocks being used to build chicken coops, so I came on here. The last post I saw said that it was fine, but that there could be problems because you have to pour footers, the walls could shift, etc. However, we have experience with pouring concrete and doing block (not to mention, we'd probably get a family friend that's in the business to do it/supervise.) So that I'm not worried about. As far as insulation, block actually hold heat (winter) and also cools (summer). Don't ask me why....we had a shop that was unairconditioned and unheated and it was always cool in the summer and warm in the winter. (Plus, we really are HUGE suckers, and because it gets SO hot here, we were thinking of airconditioning the coop during the summer with just a little window mount or something...)
I guess my question is - it won't hurt the chickens to be in block, rather than wood or whatever, right? I wouldn't think so, but I don't want to do anything bad for them and I've seen very few block coops. Any info or pictures would be great!
Thank you!
We live in Arizona and I was going to make my coop out of wood - make it look like an old west saloon (I got the idea from LilBizzy's chicken coop plans), with the plan of, by the time I have all the animals we'll be acquiring in the next year, it would like like a small western town. We were going to do cement footers.
I sat down with my dad y'day to discuss it, though, and he brought up the idea of building it out of cinder blocks, which means I have to get creative with some painting to still make it look like an old west town! But I wanted to check out why I had never heard of cinder blocks being used to build chicken coops, so I came on here. The last post I saw said that it was fine, but that there could be problems because you have to pour footers, the walls could shift, etc. However, we have experience with pouring concrete and doing block (not to mention, we'd probably get a family friend that's in the business to do it/supervise.) So that I'm not worried about. As far as insulation, block actually hold heat (winter) and also cools (summer). Don't ask me why....we had a shop that was unairconditioned and unheated and it was always cool in the summer and warm in the winter. (Plus, we really are HUGE suckers, and because it gets SO hot here, we were thinking of airconditioning the coop during the summer with just a little window mount or something...)
I guess my question is - it won't hurt the chickens to be in block, rather than wood or whatever, right? I wouldn't think so, but I don't want to do anything bad for them and I've seen very few block coops. Any info or pictures would be great!
Thank you!
