I want to see your Tx coops (want to see diff. options)

[havi]

I live in Central Tx and have finally got the money together to start building my coop. Ive looked at the Coop Page, but I dont see too many coops that are well suited for Tx. We never get snow, but do get ice sometimes, not too bad though. It gets at least 100 degrees here every summer and can get up to 113+ with the humidity. I need lots of air circulation in the coop as there are no trees around to shield it from the hot sun and dont want my chickys to roast. I see these beautiful coops that BYCers post and keep changing my mind on what I want to build and how. I pretty much know the basics of what I want to do. But I want to see what other people have built for the hot weather we have here in Tx. I look through all these old chicken books and see these open coops. Where at least one whole side of the coop is open, wired of course. How did these old farmers do it and still have a good healthy flock?
Some of my concerns are:
1.) What to do when it rains? What about the nest area?
2.) If I do the 3 solid walls and one wholeorhalf wall, which direction should it face?


So please post pictures of what your coop looks like if you live in a hot humid state.

 

[Lollipop]

Havi, most of my experience has been in south Florida, but what stands out to me in your questions is. 1) prevailing wind direction in winter. and a good strong roof. Don`t make the roof from metal as it is way too hot. Shade and plenty of water are the big needs here.

 

[kbbeale]

I have electrical run to my coops, so in the summer we have fans on the birds. There is plenty of circulation and we've never had a death due to heat. The fans really help, IMO.

Here are a couple of our coops (all enclosed, preditor proof).

This coop is approximately 6x16

And this one is smaller, obviously.....

This is the most recent coop, even though it's been a couple of years,we still havent painted it! LOL

And, we're in the process of constructing a rather large barn with runs made with a metal building we're going to have brought out here. No pics of that yet though.

 

[tknjk]

Here's a pic of mine. I'm in Abilene. It's 4x6, and it has a couple big doors I can open for ventilation. I will open them when it starts getting hot outside. They are screened in. I let my chickens run around my big old fenced in backyard, so they don't spent much time in the coop anyhow.

 

[BrackenFarms]

the wind at my house blows only one way so the face of my coop is facing the wind leaving the open side to get wind and the left side blocks wind. the roost and nest boxes ore in the left enclosed side and the nest boxes are 12 inches off the ground now if you have more questions about my coop please ask... i now have a huge run attached to the backside of the coop

 

[ArizonaDesertChicks]

Our coop is 5' x 7 1/2' and the attached run is 13' x 7 1/2'. Since the photos, we have added nestboxes and higher roosts. We have also raised one side of the green corrugated roofing panels so that the rain runs away from the run. Because we don't have wire on the 4th side, we had to make our run 'nighttime secure' - bird netting above the top wouldn't work in this situation.

We used three green plastic roofing panels from Lowe's to extend our coop's rain protection out a bit. When it rains (which isn't often), the chickens congregate in the open coop and also have about 4-5 feet of dry area in the run where their food and water is. The rest of the run is not rain proof. Adding overhead rain protection right up next to the coop also keeps rain from blowing into the coop during storms.

Edited to say: The heat lamp was also removed pretty quickly - it only kept the chickens up at night and they really weren't cold anyway.

 

[RendonRoo]

Looks good.