Use a room in the barn or make my own coop?

[lostinthewoods]

First of all I would like to say thank you to all of you who ask and answer questions on here...it has helped me a great deal. I will be receiving my first chicks in mid-april and would like to be prepared for them. I will be starting out with about 20 chicks. Anyways, we recently moved to an area with a very large amount of clay in the soil so it retains water very well, and being that it is in Wisconsin we have very cold winters. (sometimes, lol!) I know that if we used concrete for the floor it would crack in no time, so I was thinking that cement blocks or patio blocks would work since they would be able to shift with the ground if I built a new coop. On the other hand we could always use the older pole shed/barn. There is a room with some concrete on the floor where someone had made living quarters at one point. It is insulated and has paneling over the insulation. There would be plenty of room for the chickens and lots of room to expand if the need ever arose plus room for storage. There is a window on the south side as well as a door with a window. What will be the best for the chicks as they grow?

 

[bigzio]

lostinthewoods, Welcome to BYC, the already made area in the pole barn sounds like it would work, you didn't mention the size but sounds like a large enough area. Ventilation may be something to check out, however that would be easy to fix.

Placing concrete is possible in a clay area by digging down a foot or so and replacing the clay with a sand base, or some folks use crushed limestone to keep the concrete from cracking.

bigzio

 

[4H kids and mom]

Hey there fellow Wisconsin-er! We made half of our big shed into the coop by putting up a wall of plywood over the already there 2x4's and then another plywood on the other side and stuffing the middle with some insulation to help out in the winters here. We left it accessable, so if the summer gets real hot, we can pull it out and keep it to the side. We added a good sized window with a plywood 'shutter' that we can close when its cold or rainy. It's plenty big enough for our flock and had enough room for 4 nestboxes (probably more than we'll need with a flock of 10-12 layers and a roo or two, but we wanted them to have ample room) and several roosts, while still leaving plenty of room for us to walk in for easy cleaning and egg collecting. Plus, the shed already had a good floor and roof, so the hard parts were done!

 

[BeckyLa]

I would go with the room in the pole barn. It sounds ready made plus it would have the barn there as protection against the elements.