I'm a first-time chicken owner and recently moved to a house with a horse barn. The previous owners went into a chicken craze and had chickens in two sheds and the horse barn but left 8" of poopy bedding in a stall and a nesting box that likely was never cleaned before... They left me a *ton* of power washing between the walls, the grates between stalls, and even the hayloft! I want to convert one of the larger stalls (10'9"x11'6") to a coop and eventually one of the smaller ones for a breeding project, except my goal is to do this in the smartest way possible with the least chicken escapes.
My current plan of what I have to do to make the large stall habitable & safe is pretty long. I'm building an outdoor run that's roughly 24'x8' out of 2x4s and 1/4" hardware cloth and will cut a hole through the wall to allow them entrance. To make the run predator-proof, I'm going to lay 1' of hardware cloth underground. Does it matter if it's on the ground outside the run, or can it be on the inside still attached to the cloth making the walls? The option of it being inside the run seems a lot easier but also doesn't seem to make a difference in accessibility to predators to me, as it's still there. I also need to cover some smaller spaces, like the head hole in the stall door and some gaps below the hayloft. Would it matter if I used chicken wire for something like blocking them from the hayloft? I know at some point there was what I suspect to be raccoons living up there, as there's a ton of large poop above the tack room, but there hasn't been any activity or movement since I began working in the barn. My big problem with adapting a stall to be a chicken coop is that the barn wasn't built very well and has a solid 6" gap between the ground and the bottom of the stall door. I reduced this to 4" by adding dirt to the whole stall and laying stall mats over that, but I still believe it's a problem. I'm not sure how to make it predator-proof though, as you can't exacly hardware cloth that.
My current plan of what I have to do to make the large stall habitable & safe is pretty long. I'm building an outdoor run that's roughly 24'x8' out of 2x4s and 1/4" hardware cloth and will cut a hole through the wall to allow them entrance. To make the run predator-proof, I'm going to lay 1' of hardware cloth underground. Does it matter if it's on the ground outside the run, or can it be on the inside still attached to the cloth making the walls? The option of it being inside the run seems a lot easier but also doesn't seem to make a difference in accessibility to predators to me, as it's still there. I also need to cover some smaller spaces, like the head hole in the stall door and some gaps below the hayloft. Would it matter if I used chicken wire for something like blocking them from the hayloft? I know at some point there was what I suspect to be raccoons living up there, as there's a ton of large poop above the tack room, but there hasn't been any activity or movement since I began working in the barn. My big problem with adapting a stall to be a chicken coop is that the barn wasn't built very well and has a solid 6" gap between the ground and the bottom of the stall door. I reduced this to 4" by adding dirt to the whole stall and laying stall mats over that, but I still believe it's a problem. I'm not sure how to make it predator-proof though, as you can't exacly hardware cloth that.
