Thanks.Beautiful. The size makes it so if you had no use for them (this is called senior's planning) when you got ancient, could sell them off. Most all our buildings are of a width that could be trailered...built on skids of wood and pipe...portable...so like a reverse mortgage of sorts...
The shingles on the roof...quite the complimentary contrast. What are they made of please because I am curious how they have held up. Roofs can be ugly and we opted for green metal on buildings and sometimes tenplast on others.
Yeh, windows are free light and at times you want lots of ventilation and others, not so much.
I don't figure you a had much of an option so did the best you were able.
Rick placed that 3 vented cover for air circulation up and outta the way of any roof snow build up.
I like the two panels you have there to meld with the chainlink. Once, we drove past a pizza place and noted a big stack of stainless steel oven racks by the dumpster for garbage. Those moved here with us and found places all over to be used. Mostly on over human sized doors as poultry sized entrances. I find you are less likely to find scavenger birds like crows and ravens helping themselves to the feed buckets in the runs if they door is no more than a turkey size. Buggers!
I thought about what you said in that we use so many things NOT originally made for poultry...repurposed...
When I built that smaller one I figured, if I sold the place, someone could easily use it as a really nice dog kennel.
You do so many things like I do but you have more space and less concern about neighbors than I.
Luckily, most of the year, people can't really see what I'm doing here.
As for the panels you refer to, there were 6 of them in the basement when we bought the house. They were the only things down there. (the previous owner was afraid of spiders [even more than I] and never went into the basement).
I already had the chain link dog kennel but rather than put it right up against the coop, I added another man door to the kennel and moved it far enough away to use the panels as Dutch doors. I welded up some hinges and voila, I had a walk thru breezeway between the coop and run. It served several purposes. It creates a separate pen area if needed. It makes the pen larger. Since the bee hives are on the other side of the chain link kennel and in the case I'm not home and someone else needs to get into the coop, they can walk through the breezeway to get to the coop's man door without walking past the hives.
The shingles are 'architectural' type asphalt. They're the same type and color I use on my front and back porch as well as the bigger brooder house. I believe they're 35 year shingles.
All my other buildings - including the house and carriage house- are EPDM rubber roofs. Lightweight, last forever and simple to install.
Architectural shingles are very attractive on steep roofs but not so much on low slope roofs. Low slope look better with standard flat 3 tab shingles. Did I also mention I used to be a roofer?
As for the portability, other than the building that is on a concrete floor/foundation, all of my coops can be picked up and moved or loaded onto a truck with a forklift.
You may also notice in the picture that there is 3" PVC leading from the downspout portions of the guttering. They route water that would have made the pen sloppy into the first two stages of compost bins. The white pipe also simulates the trim board on the original building.
Here's another addition after the original build. An automatic water system that I can fill without even walking into the coop.
The white fitting is a cap on a hose fitting. The light green is a drain valve that closes under pressure but opens without pressure so it allows air into the system when not pressurized by adding water.
I unscrew the plug on the white pvc, remove the drain valve and replace it with a stub that, when the system is full, pours the water into the compost system.
I can hook up a water hose to fill the system, turn water on slowly and go about my gardening. When I see water pouring into the compost I know the system is full.
This is a 9 gallon system. The horizontal 3/4 pipe is the input. The arched pipe is the outlet. The 4 inch pipe has a row of nipple waterers.
I'm planning on changing it to horizontal nipples.
Does all that make sense?
Did I also say that I tend to overthink things before I do them?
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