run question

[ThinkingChickens]

Forgive my ignorance but what about staining regular wood with cedar penofin? It's less expensive that using pressure treated wood and our fence and house are stained cedar. Wouldn't this be a good alternative? Or, are you just talking about using pressure treated for the posts? Just wondering.

 

[7L Farm]

You really need to use treated wood. If you stain or paint the wood it will be an on going project plus treated wood is treated through out the board not just the surface. Here's a vintage coop that's probably 50 years old its made with cedar slats. Of course I added the run which was built with treated 4x4's & treated 2x4's. Then if I were you I would use half inch hardware cloth It will then last forever. I used chicken wire which was wrong so I added some strong wire on the bottom & added hot wire around the whole coop. I now only use hard ware cloth. I learned the hard way as usual.

 

[georgiagail]

If you don't want to use treated wood (and really, if we were building a run using wood, we'd use nothing but treated wood), have you considered a dog run instead?

Quite a few others here have used dog kennels/runs as their coop runs. Many pick up these runs through places like craigslist. We ordered ours online.

I chose that because I had just finished building the next to last phase of our privacy fence and the thought of digging more holes to sink posts into for a run made me feel faint!

Here's how our looked before we added the roof and gate:

And the finished product:

Gail

 

[patandchickens]

Quote:
It won't give you GROUND-CONTACT rot resistance to any appreciable degree. That is the whole point of pressure-treating. The type stain/protectant you're talking about is only useful aboveground, where you wouldn't use p/t anyhow.

Pat

 

[ginger c.]

thanks y'all! I think we're going to go with the treated wood option.