help with pole barn coop and run design, any ideas? PICS

[chevgrl]

I have a pole barn that is 24x48 it is divided into 3 16x24 stalls I am wanting to turn 1 stall into 2 or 3 indoor/out door pens. any ideas on the best way to divide this up?
the highlighted part is the outdoor pen

 

[patandchickens]

I guess my first question would be, how will you access the chicken stall pens, and the tackroom. (It seems as though the tack room is going to be accessible only thru a horse stall or thru the outdoor chicken pen, is this what you intend?)

Without knowing how you want the access question to work, it may be that some of my suggestions below are not compatible: but, here goes.

The most obvious and easy way to make two pens would be to divide the chicken bay in half 'horizontally' so you have two 12x16 indoor pens, and divide the outdoor pen by extending the left wall of the pole building (as fence mesh obviously, not as solid wall!) to make one outdoor pen that is 12x36 and a second one that is 12x48. If you do this, though, one of the indoor pens would have to be entered either thru the first indoor pen (from the 'top' of the barn, in the diagram) or thru the horse stall or tack room, or thru the outdoor pens. If none of those things is appealing, consider making a narrow 3' aisle along the R side of the "top" indoor pen, so that it is only 12x13, with that aisle leading to a door into the "lower" indoor pen. (If that makes any sense?)

Three pens is tougher if you want them all to be roughly-equal sizes and have access to roughly-equal portions of the outdoor run. I think probably your best bet would be to make a pen in the "upper" half of the chicken bay, perhaps 10x16, and then divide the remaining part of the bay in half along the other axis to make two 14x8 pens inside the barn. At least one of them, possibly two, would have to be entered either thru another chicken pen or thru an outdoor pen, unless you want to 'waste' even more space on aisles. For the outdoor part you would build one partition juuuuust to the left of the wall between the chickens and tack room, so there is just enough room for a popdoor from that pen into the left-hand portion of the outdoor area. Then divide the remainder of the outdoor area in half, with a popdoor to each of the other two indoor pens.

There are obviously other options too, for instance a trio of "shotgun style" long narrow indoor pens, but I think the above is probably the best from a chicken point of view at least.

Good luck, have fun,

Pat

 

[chevgrl]

Quote:
oh sorry i wasnt very cear...im good at assuming everyone knows what i know about my property

. hears an illustration i started working on.

 

[siteturbo]

FYI, For those of you interested, there is a bulletin board/forum dedicated directly to barns at www.BarnsBB.com

One cool thing is that they have a moderator that is a Professional Engineer that peeks in and answers questions about designs and construction.