- Sep 5, 2014
- 35
- 1
- 41
So this winter was our first with our new run. We used to have a small run and hutch but then we bought more birds and built them a larger area to themselves out of most of the garden.
To our horror we discovered it was a magnet for water. A broken gutter system above it on the house and little to no ground drainage meant the chickens were getting swamped and when it rained they just didn't have the common sense to go inside - they sat in cold water instead getting dirty and unhappy.
So we rushed out to find solutions including a temporary trench and then we built a roof over most of the run from clear PVC corrugated sheets. The whole thing cost me around £80 just mainly for the sheets of roofing. As with all of our wooden structures, the wood we used to build it was reclaimed from skips and building sites with permission.
Here's is what we created:
We have since cut the sheet back to be closer to the fence so we can still get past it
It's not perfect - for one thing the main fence adjoining the neighbours wasn't any where near straight but it did give us some convenient concrete posts.
Thanks to the wooden plank support underneath the roof panels, we are now also able to hand the large 30kg feeder from the roof and have built multi level areas for the chickens which we couldnt do before without them fence hopping!
The have a chicken tunnel across the back at the tallest point and a secondary platform and ramp up to the second hutch and on to the tunnel. Going to try to add some swing bars in as well if we can.
Did it work? Hell yes, nice comfy dry chickens now, so grateful we managed to get that done quickly, and hopefully a fair warning to anyone who is thinking of a run in their backyard because we completely forgot about drainage issues!
Feedback appreciated
To our horror we discovered it was a magnet for water. A broken gutter system above it on the house and little to no ground drainage meant the chickens were getting swamped and when it rained they just didn't have the common sense to go inside - they sat in cold water instead getting dirty and unhappy.
So we rushed out to find solutions including a temporary trench and then we built a roof over most of the run from clear PVC corrugated sheets. The whole thing cost me around £80 just mainly for the sheets of roofing. As with all of our wooden structures, the wood we used to build it was reclaimed from skips and building sites with permission.
Here's is what we created:
We have since cut the sheet back to be closer to the fence so we can still get past it
It's not perfect - for one thing the main fence adjoining the neighbours wasn't any where near straight but it did give us some convenient concrete posts.
Thanks to the wooden plank support underneath the roof panels, we are now also able to hand the large 30kg feeder from the roof and have built multi level areas for the chickens which we couldnt do before without them fence hopping!
The have a chicken tunnel across the back at the tallest point and a secondary platform and ramp up to the second hutch and on to the tunnel. Going to try to add some swing bars in as well if we can.
Did it work? Hell yes, nice comfy dry chickens now, so grateful we managed to get that done quickly, and hopefully a fair warning to anyone who is thinking of a run in their backyard because we completely forgot about drainage issues!
Feedback appreciated
