Wall of text incoming!
So sore! Spent pretty much all day yesterday and all day today working on modifying the old quail aviary so that I can get the roost bars and nest boxes installed. Of course forgot to take many photos before I stuck a bunch of stuff back in there for temporary storage. I will be sure to take some when I clear it back out next time I have a free day to work on it.
What I have done over the past two days is shovel out about 6 inches deep of the "floor". This was made of about 1/3 quail poop nuggets, 1/3 woody arborist mulch, and the remaining 1/3 being about equally spread between quail food "crumbles" that had turned into dust, old Sweet PDZ granules, construction/play sand, and quail feathers. The portions of the aviary that stay dry were pretty easy, due to all the stuff being really loose and dusty. But about 6 inches wide all around the wire perimeter was another story....which I knew would be the case from prior cleanouts. The problem is that rain would drip or blow into that perimeter and turn things to a concrete consistency on the surface, and then just soggy ammonia sludge below the surface. The quail did not mind, and I made sure to shovel it out every few months. The difference between that strip and the remaining floor that stayed dry always amazed me. Would go from soggy and gross, to like shoveling a sand dune. Bone dry.
Knowing that I am converting to chickens and not quail, I knew that I needed to “waterproof” the coop better. So after I shoveled out a ton of ammonia soaked floor material (and a good layer of the bone dry as well), I went to work installing corrugated polycarbonate roofing panels on some of the walls. The type you see people use to roof back patios, etc… My floor to ceiling is about 7 feet, so clearing out some of the old flooring/poop/dirt allowed me to install 8 foot tall panels (2 feet wide) without much additional work. Just dug down into the ground a little deeper right against my existing hardware cloth walls. I used solid grey panels for one of my short sides (the one without the human door), and then continued it around so that the solid color “wall” now continues about 3 feet across the large front side. Went with solid color so that the roost area and nest area would feel more secure for the birds. This area of solid colored wall is where I will have my roost bars and nest boxes. One side of it is my house, the “back” is now covered in roofing panels, and then the third side has about 3 feet of it covered. The remaining length of the long wall is still floor to ceiling hardware cloth. That long wall is about 9 feet long, so we now are left with 6 feet of “open” hardware cloth wall.
I have constructed the roost bars, poop board, and nest boxes out of one large repurposed desk. Desk is right around 5 feet wide by 2 feet deep. Don't recall the height, but assumed to be whatever is “normal” for a desk. The roost bars and poop board will be on the top of the desk, with the nest boxes built directly underneath the desk. The nest boxe(s) will be mostly communal style. Right now I have them about 14 inches high, 5 feet wide, and about 18 inches deep. May divide the 5 foot width in half. We will see. Below the nest boxes there is still about 12-18 inches of clearance for the chickens to use if they want to scratch around on the ground. I am not sure the exact head clearance since I put the entire thing on cinder blocks to keep the desk out of any future muck. Will have to measure (and take photos) when I clear it back out for the next big weekend of building.
But you may be saying, “Paul, what did you do about the rain getting in and soaking a strip of the floor?” Glad you asked! I spent a ton of mental effort (and literal time) figuring out how to supplement and modify my current roofing so that it would provide more rain protection, but without cutting thru my existing hardware cloth walls…..
For the short wall, where the roost/nests are, I managed to angle my existing roofing panels in conjunction with the new wall panels so that any water is caught and directed down the outside of the “new” vertical wall panels. Hard to describe, but should prevent any water from coming in. If any makes it in, should run down the wall panel and not cause much problem. And I can then patch that area before the next rain. I am keeping the roost/nest table away from the wall a few inches so that nobody will get wet if I do have drips running down the inside of the walls.
For the long 9 foot wall…..sort of a compromise was reached. First I installed a clear panel that covers the top 2 feet of the hardware cloth wall. Think horizontal. 8 feet wide by 2 feet “tall”. I angled the top couple inches “inward” so that any drips that are not caught by my old/existing roofing are now caught and directed down the outside of the clear wall panel. But you might say “Paul, you only covered the top 2 feet! Won’t the water just drip down the 2 foot clear panel and then hit the wire wall, drip down the wire, and end up soaking the interior floor just like it did before?” Well….yes….and no. I dug out an 8 inch deep by 8 inch wide trench and put cinder blocks in there, with the "open" side of each block facing up. The type of block with two square holes in it. Total dimensions of 8 by 8 by 16 for each block. I filled each block with ⅜ inch gravel, from my magical gravel pile. My hope is that any drippage from the wire wall will drain into there and down into mother earth. Avoiding “most” of the soaking of the bedding that I saw in the past. I am HOPING the chickens don't scratch out the gravel. I think it should be ok since the gravel is pretty large diameter (we aren’t talking pea gravel here), and it is contained in each cinder block’s 8 inch square hole. Time will tell.
The plan is to have the bedding about even with the top of the blocks, so I am fully aware that bedding from the coop is going to get scratched onto the top of the blocks/gravel. It will just need to be one of my daily chores to sweep it back into the dry areas of the coop, exposing the gravel/cinder blocks again and again. With such massive amounts of ventilation overall, I am not worried about some wet bedding raising the humidity in the coop. I will bet good money that I will never see a difference in humidity inside versus outside the coop. Doing the math, I have something around 30 square feet of ventilation on the long wall, and 42 square feet on the wall with the door in it. Haha.
I will leave you with one photo. This is a drop of water hanging from the framing of the coop. The sun was at the perfect place in the sky to cause the drop of water to act like a prism and spread the sunlight in a fan shape on the underside of the beam.
