I'm crazy and want to move the coop.

[applecore]

Our nine chickies are in a coop at the corner of our three acres right now. It's a partition of a larger shed and I'm just not liking it now that winter had hit.
*Their door to go outside faces west to an open field. Lots of wind.
*No line of sight to the house. We already lost one buff to a predator back in September with another badly injured.
*Cement floor. I'd like a true deep litter if I could.

We have another shed that is much closer to the house. It has a dirt floor with doors that open up to an enormous lilac bush on one side and a shady piney area on the other. Very sheltered from the wind. Am I silly to want to up and move them now? DH will not be helping, that's for sure, since he built the roosts and walls for this one.

 

[foreverlearning]

I redid my coop 3 times before I was happy. Not crazy. Think about how much loss of sleep and stress from it you will go threw by worrying about them all night long. It would be best to have them where you won't worry all night. Because they have already imprinted on the coop in the back you may want to lock them in the new coop for a couple of days to make sure that when you do let them out they will return at night. The first week you will want to do a head count at night and if you have any missing go to the old coop and bring them back to the new one.

 

[The Yakima Kid]

Our nine chickies are in a coop at the corner of our three acres right now. It's a partition of a larger shed and I'm just not liking it now that winter had hit.
*Their door to go outside faces west to an open field. Lots of wind.
*No line of sight to the house. We already lost one buff to a predator back in September with another badly injured.
*Cement floor. I'd like a true deep litter if I could.

We have another shed that is much closer to the house. It has a dirt floor with doors that open up to an enormous lilac bush on one side and a shady piney area on the other. Very sheltered from the wind. Am I silly to want to up and move them now? DH will not be helping, that's for sure, since he built the roosts and walls for this one.

No, you aren't silly at all.

You can do deep litter on concrete; if you don't have a solid floor you need to get serious about blocking burrowing predators and put rat sheathing on the walls. The darn things will eat right through the wall or dig in if you don't have a good solid floor. Wood floors - and preferably the entire house - need to be about a foot off the ground or the rats move in under them and eat their way through the floor.

If you look at old style backyard coops, a fair number of them were built so cats could get under them for rodent control. Old floor housing in commercial floor operations might have been built level with the ground - but they were sheathed and tended to have ledges made from boards on the outside walls for cats to leap between to gain access to the housing for rodent control. These were spaced so rats couldn't use them.