New Coop Floor Thoughts?

[smith2]

My husband and I are talking about your situation. He says to be sure if you use a footer and slope your soil downward away from the footer or build the footer up so water will not collect around your walls and drain back into your coop. You might want to consider guttering or other water catching devices if you get a lot of rain. We have guttering that catches our water and channels it into barrels which we use later for watering our birds.

I guess if you put in a floor, I am assuming your coop in up off of the ground; therefore, water might not be a problem. We raised our footer about 3-4 inches above the ground. It took us about 3 days to complete the footer, but everything else went up really fast after that. We went to our local sawmill and got "seconds" to use for the walls (cheap).

 

[pawsplus]

I have vinyl on my new coop floor. Once you get bedding on top you don't see it and neither do they. I can't see them pecking through it.

 

[felidaet]

Thanks all for your input. Good points raised about not framing the walls on top of the vinyl. I have decided that I am going to go ahead and use the 3/4 pressure treat plywood. I will wait to install the vinyl until after I have the coop built. I am also considering the suggestion of adding vinyl about 2 feet up the walls. However, this will require that I sheet the inside of the walls. I was thinking about not doing this to save on the cost of the lumber but I will reconsider. Coops can sure get expensive fast... I am trying to keep my budget under $400 but it will be a challange.

Regardless of weather I put plywood on the inside of the walls of not, I am planning to paint the interior well with primer and two coats of an exterior paint (either smi-gloss or gloss). I like the suggestion someone made on another thread to look at the paint store for the deeply discounted wrong mixes. I will use this for the interior. For the exterior I am either going to match the color of my house paint or use barn red.

 

[CityChook]

Hi - it sounds like you have come to your conclusions, but I thought I would add my $.02 since I have a set up that sounds quite similar to what you want to do...

I have my 6x8 coop set up on concrete blocks. We get a fair amount of snow melt in the spring and I didn't want that water coming in, so it's about 8 inches above ground level. I used 2x6 for the framing for the floor and 3/4 pressure treated plywood for the flooring. As a preventative, I also used a waterproofing acrylic seal coat on both sides of the plywood prior to screwing it down.

Budget started getting tight as construction continued, so I by-passed the vinyl flooring and simply PRIMED PRIMED PRIMED and then painted the floor with exterior paint.

I have deep litter and truthfully, I never see the floor. It's sealed pretty well between the waterproofing/oil based primer/exterior paint, so if anything gets spilled I don't have to worry about it absorbing into the wood. I ran a bead of caulk around the base to keep water from flowing underneath the walls and called it a day. I toss my shavings with a rake and would sort of worry about pulling up a vinyl tile with the rake tines. It works well for me.

Good luck!

 

[patandchickens]

If conditions will be reasonably dry, good priming and painting is a reasonable strategy and will save you the cost of plywood to close off the interior side of the walls (tho you will OTOH be spending money on paint.... but you can use freebies or mistints).

If it seems quite possible that the litter will sometimes be damp -- either from getting damp by tracked-in mud or blown-in rain, or from just never really drying out due to chronically humid atmosphere -- I would be leerier of skipping the interior wall.

Reason being, without that wall (vinylized or not) any rot that starts to occur, from damp litter piled against lower parts of walls, will be rotting your studs (structural) and siding (the only barrier against predators, and also usually more expensive and/or annoying to have to replace than indoor plywood is). I would by no means count on paint to prevent such rot, although it will delay it.

I think it mostly comes down to your preference about pay-and-work now vs pay-and-work later, and what you want the longevity of the structure to be like.

Have fun,

Pat