FRP ... cleaning the easy way.

[Shezadandy]

I used FRP ( Glasliner 4 ft. x 8 ft. White .090 FRP Wall Board-MFTF12IXA480009600 - The Home Depot ) on my coop walls. I glued them to the plywood inside walls of my coop with FRP glue, then used roofing screws with the rubber gasket to secure them to the wall frame. Those screws help keep the water out when it's time to clean.

FRP really brightens up the coop, and is pretty easy to clean with soap and water, having been used in public bathrooms everywhere. Best of all, it keeps the poop my chickens manage to fling all over the walls at incredible angles from soaking in to plywood and becoming a permanent smell.

Anyhow ...

I'd always used a hose with a brass goosneck shut-off sprayer on the lowest possible setting and a soapy bucket of water. BTW the floor has 3/4" horse stall mats to protect the plywood decking and provide good traction and easy cleaning- and I use pine pellets on the floor, which soak up water when it's time to scrub.

Enter the head-smacker moment.

I got a battery powered sprayer, like the kind used for weed control to spray the coop for mites. While contemplating dealing with cleaning prior to spraying for mites, it finally occurred to me to use the sprayer to clean. Misting the walls to soften up what I call "chicken art work", followed by a scrub - then a rinse from the sprayer - took about 6 gallons of water total for my 8x14ft coop.

A deterrent to more frequent cleaning of the walls has always been shoveling out the extra heavy water-soaked bedding, as water of course weighs about 8lbs/gallon. Now I can easily spot clean, letting the pine pellets soak up that little bit of water.

I'm sure people much smarter than me figured this out long ago, but I offer this up as a nifty back saving trick.

 

[aart]

Sprayer better than hose for sure.

Do you remove the mats to check for mold growth under them?

What are those boxes around the windows over roost?

 

[Shezadandy]

Sprayer better than hose for sure.

Do you remove the mats to check for mold growth under them?

What are those boxes around the windows over roost?

The boxes around the windows are where I put naughty roosters.
Just kidding.

I chose hopper windows instead of up/down or side/side in order to have the entire window opening free for air movement with no greenhouse effect from sun shining through the glass. The one downside is the glass sits horizontal (the white line in the middle is the glass frame).

The hardware cloth boxes are to keep the chickens from 'fowling up' the windows, both for keeping them free of poop- and keeping the opening clear from chickens for max air circulation. I built the boxes to open on hinges in the front, for easy opening and closing. And the exterior of the windows have 1/2" hardware cloth bolted in by the window frames for predator proofing.

At the last house, when I was cleaning everything up to sell it, I did venture a peak under the mats in both the goat house and my last chicken coop, which are built the same way as my new ones, by folding up along the interior seams with every last speck of dirt and bedding removed. Aside from a smattering of small particles from the pine pellets that had settled into the seams - everything was dry and looked like new after 5 years of chickens and 7 years of goats (peeing everywhere!), and me pounding away with the pressure washer (not my new sprayer).

The mats are built into the building- they extend over the entire floor decking all the way to the edge with very tight interior edges. (this is a picture from the 1st goat house)

A 2x6 was laid over the perimeter and screwed into the floor frame, then the wall frames were placed on the 2x6. The 2x6 is what holds the interior walls 1 1/2" up from the coop floor. Before installing the interior walls I put z-flashing over the 2x6, and there's 90 degree flashing over that to cover it all the way to the ground ... with pvc trim strips at the bottom of the wall, and also from the 2x6 to the mat, screwed and caulked in.