Will this idea work for a coop?

[studentjh55]

I am going to have a wooden chicken house inside the pen with 2 different kinds of locks and galvanized hardware cloth over the vents. The chickens will be locked inside at night.

For the pen I will lay hardware cloth down on the ground, and make a roof and walls out of it and zip ties. I will also put sand down to keep it dry. Will this work?

 

[Ol Grey Mare]

I am going to have a wooden chicken house inside the pen with 2 different kinds of locks and galvanized hardware cloth over the vents. The chickens will be locked inside at night.

For the pen I will lay hardware cloth down on the ground, and make a roof and walls out of it and zip ties. I will also put sand down to keep it dry. Will this work?

You have great general ideas there - what are you housing, what dimensions are you planning to build with, etc? Also, when you asy you are putting hardware cloth down on the ground - are you thinking of flooring the entire run area with hardware cloth in an effort to prevent predatory invasion? If so, it is more commonly done to take the cloth out away from the bottom of the run as a "skirting" that is buried down in the dirt around the perimeter so that a digging predator on the outside of the pen encounters that wire when they start to dig -- this approach is also likely to be much more cost effective as it requires far less hardware cloth than to floor an entire pen in it. What sort of framing are you going to use with the hardware cloth and zip ties?

 

[studentjh55]

I was planning to use metal posts. The pen is 6 by 8 feet for 2 chickens.