Oooh! I just love daydreaming about spring/summer chicken projects! We're gonna have so much fun with that subject once the house is done.
Please Great Spirit! Let us be done building the house before the end of summer this year!
Now then, if money and time were no issue, you just know I'd be having me the Taj Mahal of chicken coops! But, since I am a mere mortal of common means, I'll have to do what I can, with what I have, where I'm at, as Teddy Roosevelt would say!
We still have a great many of those clear polycarbonate panels that I mentioned last fall. They still need to be stripped off of the vinyl tape stuff on them, but that's OK. They make awesome building materials. Especially as the roof of a covered run. So far this winter, they've held up impressively well!
And we'll probably have a good deal of left over OSB sheets from building the house. At least I rather hope we do. And if we do, me and the chickens have first dibs on all of it!
My long term hopes and plans are just this. I'd like to build two more small coops like the converted dog house that I have Brutus, Red and CB in now. It's a 4x4 footprint, which sounds small, but you'd be surprised at just how much room is in there! Three big boys don't even put a dent in the available space! And if I built the bump out kind of nest boxes on each of them, there will be even more room. Certainly more than enough for one boy and five girls of my choosing!
So, I need two of those to put all of my boys happily ensconced in their own coop with their own flock of girls.
Next, I'd really love to build another full sized coop, maybe just slightly smaller than the big coop is now, which is 10Wx10Lx8+H I'd like to build something that has a bit lower ceiling height, as in the winter, I know a lot of heat gets wasted up there where nobody can roost.
Besides, the chooks aren't tall, and neither am I!! Who needs eight foot ceilings in a chicken coop for crying out loud!
I'd really love to have hot and cold running water in the new coop, with a deep sink and an area sectioned off for storage. So, maybe actually the same footprint as the existing coop, just with a shorter wall height. And in a perfect world, I could convince Denny that it should actually be 16x16 so that I could have that extra storage room within the coop itself.
In addition to being well insulated, I'd also like to have a better heat source than the 250 watt heat lamp bulb currently in the big coop. Believe me, it's not much help when we're dipping down in the minus 20 range overnight. Not to mention that in a coop of that size, it would probably be completely ineffectual.
I'd also like to figure out a safe heat source for the boys coop too, and then incorporate that idea into the two new small coops. I'm sure I could come up with some kind of shielded bulb set up so that it can go up near the roof, without burning the darn thing down, or have to worry about one of the boys singeing their combs on it!
*Sigh* So many things I'd love to do for my babies. It always gives me such deep satisfaction when I see them all nestled down for the night in a coop that I know is predator proof, and that is as comfortable and clean as I can make it for them. I really do think they appreciate my efforts....or at least I like to think they do!
