I inherited 22 hens and a rooster. Cleaning help please!!!

[MamaBirda]

The coop is custom from previous owners, roughly about 12'x9' fully enclosed, insulated, vented properly ( I think), and an elevated floor with indoor laminate wood flooring throughout the coop. Two small doors from the run into the coop and two narrow doors from foyer into the coop on opposite end. The run is 20'x20'. It's all white painted wood and cute but ridiculous to clean. I'll try and post existing photos with this post but add better ones when I can. I use pine shavings in coop and nesting beds. The run is dirt/mud/mucked out pine shavings from coop cleaning. I'm in southern Washington, LOT'S of rain. Pine shavings are soggy, nasty, don't dry out and I find myself completely changing out shavings almost weekly because of the ammonia and SO MUCH POOP. Does anyone have success with all purpose sand and a litter scoop? Also, can I line the painted wood interior with something easier to sipe down or remove to clean easily? I'm tempted to go to a corporate plastic molding company to get a mold custom made for the interior roosts. The design of the coop is really not cleaning friendly, it should have been a doll house. Can't afford to tear down and build new.
You can sort of see the roosts but not behind the roosts. I'll take more pics to post today. You can see the middle of the coop where I cut out the chicken wire so I can access, and the hens can access water and food more easily.

 

[3KillerBs]

Welcome to BYC.

What lovely birds you have! There must be a story behind inheriting them but what a task to learn to manage chickens with such a large flock!

The coop is custom from previous owners, roughly about 12'x9' fully enclosed,

The Usual Guidelines say that each adult, standard-sized hen needs 4 square feet in the coop so that's an appropriate amount of space.

The run is 20'x20'.

Likewise at 10 square feet per bird in the run you have generous space.

This is great, because you don't have to cope with one of the most common problems causing poor sanitation -- overcrowding.

Wood shavings are the most common and most easily handled bedding, but they aren't necessarily the *best* bedding depending on circumstances -- especially out in the run.

First, how deep are you piling them when you change the bedding? Have you tried adding more shavings instead of removing and replacing them so often? This is my article on Deep Bedding: https://www.backyardchickens.com/articles/using-deep-bedding-in-a-small-coop.76343/

Yes, my article is targeted to a small flock in a small coop, but it's actually easier to manage deep bedding in a large coop than in a smaller space because there's room for more volume of bedding which means more capability for drying the poop out FAST.

Second, could we see more photos of the coop in and out? Especially photos of the ventilation?

Sometimes having enough area of ventilation -- ~ 1 square foot of 24/7/365 ventilation per bird -- isn't as important as having it in the right place. The right place being at the very top of the coop, because heat and ammonia both rise.

Third, you've got a very challenging climate for your run. How is the overall drainage? In addition to the regular rainfall, is any water running into the run off the coop roof, off other nearby structures, or over the ground through natural drainage channels?

Guttering helps with directing runoff from roofs and diversion ditches, French drain, and/or grass swales can move ground-level runoff around the run.

Coarse wood chips, the sort you get from a tree-trimming service, are usually considered the gold standard for dealing with muddy runs.

Is sand easier to manage poop than pine?

Some people think so. I don't. I think that Deep Bedding in the coop and Deep Litter in the run are the easiest to manage.

Almost all the people who use sand in their coop and/or run and who are happy with it over the long term live in dry climates.

I suggest that you go onto your Washington state thread to get advice directly from people who are living with the same climate. https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/washingtonians-come-together-washington-peeps.717207/unread

 

[DobieLover]

I cleaned it all day yesterday and cleaned off about 10 lbs of poop this morning off just the boards.

Wow. That's a LOT of poop!

I have 27 birds that I'll call "23 LF equivalent" to account for the bantams and mid-sized birds. They have 25' of roost space over lipped boards. It takes me no more than 20 minutes to do chores in the morning.

I'm approaching peak poop board load as the days get shorter. I clean the boards daily and it takes about 1.5 weeks to fill a cat litter bucket that weighs about 40 pounds full.
I strongly suggest getting a solid roof on the run and installing gutters to divert run off away from the setup.
As has been suggested, wood chips are a great substrate. I use them and also allow my flock out of their coop/run combo daily. I have never removed anything from the run. I just add wood chips as needed.

I keep all the food and water in the run. Getting feeders and waterer out of your coop would help with the crowding in there and make it easier for you to work in there.

 

[aart]

You corrected "how many" to say there are 22.
But you forgot the rooster, who makes 23.

For this assessment, 1 more birds doesn't really matter.

 

[RubelliteRose]

Your flock is beautiful
I have a run that is part sand and part deep litter. We have occasional wind driven flooding so our original covered 12x6 run is 6" of sand. Pro- it drains very quickly. Con- I scoop it at least twice a day to keep up with the poop (my flock free ranges much of the day as well). I wouldn't want a larger area of sand, it is just too much work.
The new area,uncovered 12x12, is deep litter. We use a mix of shavings, chunky pine bark, hay and pine needles, periodically adding more of what ever we have around. As the bedding gets deeper, there is much less mess and no smell. It also is starting to drain quicker with deeper bedding. We won't be removing the sand from the original run, but I will never create a sand based run again.
I do however, love the sand/PDZ mix I use on the poop boards in our larger coop. I would add some kind of lip to your boards and use that instead of shavings.
Your coop will also stay cleaner if you can move the food and water out into the run. We built a "table" in the uncovered portion of our run to protect the food from the rain.

 

[Sally PB]

This is inspired by @3KillerBs food shelter. It's built out of pallet scrap, a left over piece of metal roofing, and left over scrap of OSB.

Before I had the roof over the run, it kept food totally dry.

 

[3KillerBs]

Is there a concern for the deep bedding and the amount of rain/moisture?

Deep bedding absorbs moisture from the poop and from tracked-in mud and helps it dry -- as long as there is enough volume of bedding and as long as it stays fluffy.

I guess I'm concerned with the smell, respiratory issues and poop smear. The pine tends to stick to their feet and they track poop everywhere. It's also like paste to scrape off once it dries. I figured with sand, it might act as an exfoliating mechanism and since it's heavier it may tend to stay on the floors/poop boards and not all over the walls.

If you're having odor problems with that much space for your birds I suspect that you need either more ventilation total or more top-level ventilation.

Alternately you might not be using enough depth of bedding to rapidly dehydrate the poop.

Since you've got poop boards, which I don't use, I'm going to tag @DobieLover and @aart to have a look at the arrangement.

I'm also tagging @rosemarythyme who lives in your general area, IIRC.

 

[3KillerBs]

I LOVE your setup. So open and spaced out.

Dobie's coop is an inspiration for a lot of bright, airy, easy-to-maintain coops.

 

[MamaBirda]

I'd definitely NOT attempt deep litter in the coop with this flooring as the floor is already taking moisture damage (run is different, absolutely try deep litter). Deep litter favors having moisture for composting down poop, therefore it doesn't work in most coop set ups.

You mentioned trying sand for the coop, which can work if you're willing to scoop it out daily. I know there's specific sizes of sand that folks favor but I know very little about it, so unfortunately I can't make recommendations.

A sloped top/cover on top of the nest box will prevent birds from sleeping up there. A simple way to make one is to hinge a piece of scrap plywood over the top of the nests. 45 degree slope as shown below is ideal, I've watched a chicken try to sit on top of my nests and slooowly slide right off.

View attachment 2914761

I'm also curious as to how much roost space you have, as 23 birds = 23' in roost, and not sure you have that much, which might be contributing to birds sleeping on top of the nests.


I do have screens on my windows, just keep in mind they need to be cleared of dust every so often so they don't clog up (I use a broom to loosen and leaf blower to blow them out).

Incidentally chicken wire isn't predator proof, but it'd be costly to replace/layer on that much hardware cloth. Might want to look into electric for extra security against bigger predators.

I definitely don't think there's enough roost space and they seem too close together. I'm thinking of reinforcing the mid beam to be able to take out the middle floor beams... I don't know for sure if they're even load bearing. Doing this and moving food and water into run may free up space in the coop for sleeping and nesting and also help the poop situation a bit. To be continued...
I have received so many awesome tips and fantastic feed back. Thank you so much!

 

[MamaBirda]

I cannot say whether they are load bearing, but it looks like the coop was originally divided into two parts, so the chickens could be managed as two separate flocks.

Sometimes that is a great thing (like when separating groups for breeding, or brooding a batch of chicks in one part while some older birds live in the other part), but other times it is not so good (when you want to manage the chickens as a single large flock, and don't want that stuff in the way.)

But I would think before trying to take those out: are you likely to want to divide the coop in future? If not, I agree with removing them (if they are not load-bearing.)

Yes, we thought about the brooding chicks possibly too. At this point, I don't know about our future with chicks but I'm thinking this could be an easy fix with a temp divider until they're grown, if we take the beams out now. I think long term, the ease of "now" is worth the temp fix in the future. As it is, they'll be no new chickens if all my time is cleaning what I currently have.