Hello from OH IO!!

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JoJoVango

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Aug 27, 2022
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Hi everyone! My name is Jodi and I live near Canton, Ohio. We have 5 adult children, youngest is 20 and still lives at home. The other 4 are married, so we also have 3 amazing DIL and one SIL. So HUGE crazy family here. I’ve never had chickens before, but I’ve wanted chickens for years. When we would drive around and I see people with chickens I’d go nuts and say “Chickens….we need chickens”, to which my husband would reply, “no we don’t”. This spring I decided I wanted to do a small raised bed vegetable garden for the first time ever. So more and more I would be joking “we are practically farmers, we should get chickens.” So after a couple of months of sharing the positives, and downright chicken talk, and our neighbors selling a coop they had used as a bunny hut, a prebuilt one from TSC, for $100, we got our chickens in June of this year (2022) and they are approximately 11 weeks old. We have 6 girls, 4 Buff Orpingtons and 2 Gold Laced Wyandottes. They are so stinkin’ cute. We live in an area where there are suburbs behind us, and several farms a mile up the road. Our property isn’t huge so the girls have a small coop that sits inside of a larger run. Someday I hope to build them a better coop. I think they will eventually need something bigger, after recently seeing a silver laced Wyandotte at the Columbus zoo, she was HUGE!! We love just sitting outside and watching the girls be goofballs in their run. We especially think it’s hilarious when they “go toe to toe”. One will run up to another and get in her face and puff up her feathers and they do this head Bob thing. And then they just go play together. Hahaha. Anyway. We are loving our girls, and my husband is Gaga over our girls. Found this site from Pinterest for an issue we had happen recently.
 
Hello and welcome to BYC! :frow Glad you joined.
JoJoVango said:
Someday I hope to build them a better coop. I think they will eventually need something bigger
Click to expand...
This needs to happen much sooner than later. Those girls are going to be crammed like sardines in a tiny pre-fab coop and will undoubtedly suffer frost bite this winter due to the notorious lack of ventilation they have.
Your birds need 4 sq ft of floor space per bird in the coop, about 1 linear foot of roost space and as close to 1 sq ft of permanently open ventilation per bird. You cannot achieve that in any TSC pre-fab. And when winter comes, do they have space outside that will be protected from snow and driving winter winds?
 
Glad to meet you, Jodi and welcome to BackYard Chickens. You can see lots of coop designs by going here. Many of them will include details and plans, and lots also have reviews from other BYC members. That same link will hook you up to the learning center to find more articles beyond the ones I give you below. All the articles are short, and most have helpful pictures as well as excellent descriptions and handy tips.

One thing Bob at FluffyButt Acres (look him up, he's a member here) mentioned that I thought was incredibly helpful, was to look at where your prevailing winds blow. If you don't know off hand, you can check with the National Weather Service for your area. (use google and look up national weather service, Canton, Oh). Try to set up your coop so that the ventilation lines up with the prevailing winds (not storms, but general breezes).

Here is an article about ventilation in coops, and another about predator proofing new and existing coops. It seems ironic, but ventilation will be more important in cold weather than in hot, though it's important all the time. Chicken poop is just full of ammonia (which is why it will eventually make fabulous compost for your garden, after it ages). You have to be sure the ammonia doesn't build up in there, because the chickens will get sick!

When winter comes, you will want to "winterize" the coop, so that there is still plenty of air flow moving at the top of the coop and pen. But you want to block drafts that are at chicken level. The ventilation article is very helpful showing how air flow should be able to move, pulling air from below and out the upper levels. It brings in fresh air for the hens, ideally without drafts.
 

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