Fellow Texans, I need a bit of advice. I'm in the beginning stages of redoing my coop. I have a 30 x 30 barn that I am redoing into 6 10 x 10 coops with a 10 x 30 aisle down the center. I have taken down the North wall and had planned on replacing it with new siding. I was going to enclose the entire end, with a door in the middle and a large upper vent in the eaves for ventilation. Today I was out there standing in the aisle thinking how nice it was with the breeze blowing through. It was over 80 degrees today. That got me to thinking, instead of enclosing the North wall, just hardware the whole wall and put up tarps/plastic during the winter to block the wind. In fact, I plan on pulling down all the walls and having it all hardware with plastic up where needed during the winter. What are ya'lls thoughts, opinions or suggestions? Am I nuts for making an all wire coop? Either way, I plan on taking down the walls in my current coop and putting up hardware cloth. This is how it looked this morning. Your looking at the North end, my coop is on the South end.
This is how it looked this afternoon after I took down the wall, stall boards and odd/end junk, lol
Thanks for any suggestions!
Our chickens do great in open air coops. We do put plywood walls on one end so that they have safety against raccoons trying to grab them through the wire though. So that is something to think about unless you are going to put up all hardware cloth that is too small to let a coon or possum be able to reach through the wire. You wouldn't want the chickens to back into a corner and then give a coon easy access to reach in and start pulling body parts out of the wire. But other than determining what kind of wire you use, a full wire coop is a fine idea when done right. There is a good bit of antique poultry literature where open air coops were used and recommended even in cold climates and the birds were noted to be quite hardy. They would put wood up on the north/west sides and also hang canvas tarps to wall off sections to help the birds be able to retain body heat in the space during winter without having direct wind on the birds and still have plenty of air flow to reduce the humidity that causes frostbite issues.
