Converting a greenhouse

catchthewind

Songster
8 Years
Jan 27, 2011
366
4
113
Vancouver Island
After lots more discussion and reading, my husband and I are thinking we might like to convert an old greenhouse that's on our property into a coop. The sides have been taken down long ago and it was used by the previous owners as log storage. It's actually potentially in a really great location for it. Near enough to the house to be convenient, lots of forested area around it that we weren't planning on using for garden, near the kitchen.







More pictures here

It is 10 feet long by 7.5 feet wide, so if I'm correct it could comfortably hold around 20 chickens (assuming a few of them were bantams). That would be more than big enough for us. Our plan right now is to take down the latticed sides and replace with plywood. We thought we'd put pop doors on three sides so we can rotate which pasture they're in, though you'll notice the bottom couple of feet or so is logs so I'm not sure if we'd need ramps up to the pop doors on the inside as well as the outside? It is directly on dirt. We figured we would put hardware cloth down on the floor to prevent predators from digging in, and then cover it with bedding (pine shavings?) and use the deep litter method. We would also bury hardware cloth around the outside. We would make sure to add some ventilation. We may even have the first two or three feet as a more open coop design (similar to something I posted about in this thread), with the ability to close up the coop for the times in winter when it's chilllier.

My questions are, first, can anyone see any potential problems with converting this? Is the roof as is okay or would we have to replace/change that too?

If we wanted three different pastures to rotate the chickens around, say using each one for 1-2 weeks and then giving it a rest, with the intention that none of them would get fully picked over, how big would each one need to be?

Any other ideas, tips, things to think about?

Thanks!
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ETA: Keeping this as a greenhouse in this location is not an option. See more below, but basically it's a crappy spot for a greenhouse as it's not in full sun in fall, winter, and spring. It's also one of the best places for chickens as it has enough room that we can create several different paddocks for them without having to have a portable coop. So even if we don't repurpose this greenhouse, it will come down and we will build our coop here.
 
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The only concern I'd have with repurposing a greenhouse with a clear roof is whether the inside of the coop will get too hot in the summer from the "greenhouse effect." I tried a clear polycarb roof on my small winter coop because I was hoping it would get warmer inside for the winter. It did, but the heat dissipated so quickly as soon as the sun went down it did not solve my winter housing problem. And in the summer, the roof made the coop get unbearably hot inside in the afternoon sun, so hot that my chickens would have roasted rather than roosted inside. Generally speaking, chickens manage cold much better than they can manage heat, because of their down insulation.

Do read Patandchicken's excellent page about ventilation, if you haven't already.

https://www.backyardchickens.com/web/viewblog.php?id=1642-VENTILATION

Are you summers hot? Where we live (DFW), no amount of ventilation really counteracts the effect of having a clear roof coop in afternoon summer sun. I have one coop/run that's completely open sided (wire), but I foolishly sited it without natural shade. Heat builds up under the roof making it quite uncomfortable for several hours after sundown.

About occupancy: the usual rule of thumb you read here is 4 square feet per chicken indoors, but I consider that more of a minimum than a "comfortable" number for occupancy especially if there is the possibility that the chickens will occasionally be closed inside the coop for a day or two because of bad weather, emergencies, etc. 20 chickens will produce an amount of manure daily that may well astound you. The higher the stocking density within a coop, the more work for you. And certainly 20 chickens are going to decimate a rotational paddock much faster than 10 will.

Whether you need ramps or not depends on the breed of chicken you choose. The bigger, heavier breeds have a harder time getting up and down, while little bantams like mine think nothing of flying up to a 5 foot high roost. The pop door to my winter coop is raised two feet off the ground, and I've fashioned the door like a drawbridge so they have a platform to land on when they fly up to enter. It works fine.

Rather than burying wire, consider using a hardware cloth wire apron, attached to the base of your building and/or run, and extending outward flat on the ground 2 feet or so. The predator tries to dig at the base of the run or coop, hits the wire, and doesn't understand that it needs to back up 2 feet and start digging from there. It's much easier to use an apron than burying wire, and I think it works just as well, if not better.

You have the makings of a very nice coop, there!
 
Thank you! I worried the same about the clear roof, since it is for a greenhouse.
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I will go have a read through the ventilation page. We are considered fairly temperate (at least for Canada). The coldest it's ever been here in the last two years is -10C (14F) and the hottest was 35C (95F). Those are the extremes though. In general it hangs around freezing or just under overnight and sits around 5C (~41F) during the day for the coldest parts of winter, and gets up to around 20-25C (77F) in the summer. But I would be worried about that roof at those temperatures, especially since one side of the roof is south facing. We have lots of trees, so it probably does get shade, though it's hard to know for sure since this is our first year here. We had our house reshingled and supposedly there is an extra pack of shingles kicking around somewhere, but we haven't found it. I'll have to call up our roof guy and find out where it is. Though the shingles are black, but I assume a shingled roof would be better?

As for the number of chickens, while we may have 20 occasionally over spring/summer, right now I can't ever see us having that many over winter when they'd be in the coop more. I could be wrong (I've read about chicken math a few times here) but in that case I'd have to rethink. I have 12 chicks coming this spring, and we plan to keep only the hens. Then depending on how that goes, we may or may not add to them next year. Our original plan if the birds don't become too much pets to us was to do something like what is described in Storey's Guide to Chickens (raise chicks and then replace the layers every year and put the roosters and old layers in the freezer), but we'll see how that goes. Good point about the number decimating the paddocks too. We have 1.4 acres to work with, though I don't want the chickens having it all. We were thinking of splitting up about .25 acres into three paddocks for them.

About the hardware cloth apron, does it need to be hidden or buried at all, or can it be laying on the ground and still fool predators?

Lastly, would it be a good idea to have a smallish (still keeping in mind the number of chickens we plan on, but I mean small compared to the paddocks) chicken run that's permanent and covered for if we go away for a weekend or if I'm gone all day and don't want to leave them out? Can chickens be left for a weekend? We're going to obviously try and predator proof the paddocks as much as possible, but they won't be covered. I know hawks can be a problem here, though we've got lots of forest and cover around for the chickens.

Thanks so much! Sorry for all the questions.
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I want to make sure our chickens are happy and we don't learn lessons the hard way at their expense.
 
I'm hoping some other members who live up north will chime in about your roofing question, since I only know from my own experience down south about how it works in extreme heat...something you encounter rarely. Hereabouts, we'll probably hit our first daytime "95" of the year in May, definitely by June, and we won't drop down regularly under that before October. My daughter and husband sometimes swim in our pool on Halloween weekend!

A greenhouse roof would be nice during the winter in your climate, especially if you could figure out a way to "hold" some of that heat overnight. The roof panels by themselves won't do it.

And on the rare days when you do get really hot weather in the summer, you could mitigate the effects of the roof by blocking it off. In my small "winter" coop, I put a sheet of the double sided reflective insulation over the roof panels, and found this helps.

No, I don't think you need to hide the apron from predators. In our yard, grass has grown up through the wire around two of our pens, hiding it naturally. For our last run, I put wood chips down over the apron, which is another option. That was more aesthetic than an attempt to trick critters, though.

Yes, I do think it's an excellent idea to have a permanent, secure run...just in case. You never know when you'll be very glad to have it, in addition to the times you mention. Hawks are very hard on chickens in a paddock, since the chickens can't really scatter as their instincts dictate. Some people string wire with something sparkly attached (like old cds) over the tops of their open runs. Others use chicken wire or gamebird netting.

Many people do leave their chickens unattended for a few days (leaving adequate food and water behind, of course). If you have a really secure run, you can leave the chicken door open to let the chickens put themselves to bed and come out in the morning. There's probably more predator risk to doing this than leaving the chickens locked inside the coop, but if your chickens are at all crowded in the coop, you have to balance that risk against the risk of the chickens getting "stir crazy" indoors and starting to peck at each other.

Of course, when eggs are left to accumulate in a nest, rather than being collected every day, this might stimulate one of your hens to go broody, or (worse) one of the eggs might get broken from hens clambering in and out of the nest. Once chickens realize there's something good to eat in those eggs, you could end up with one or more "egg eaters," hens who deliberately break eggs to eat them. This is a very bad habit that's difficult to break.

Welcome to the forum, and please ask all the questions you can think of. People who spend time here love chickens and love discussing everything about them. By the way, the pictures of your site look absolutely stunning ! If I was going to guess, I would imagine you live somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. British Columbia, maybe?
 
The reason we don't want to use it as a greenhouse is because it's actually in a pretty bad space for a greenhouse, but a great space for chickens. I don't think it will ever get full sun because of all the trees around it. Plus because of the way our land is laid out, it's one of the best spots where we can give the chickens a lot of pasture room all in one spot without having to move the coop around. We are big gardeners and I'm learning all about permaculture and design and I would like to have a greenhouse, but it will be where the rest of our garden is in a much sunnier spot.

Elmo, thank you so much for the thorough responses. It's very helpful. You are dead on too.
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I'm on Vancouver Island.
 
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Is that because you think it would make a good greenhouse, or because you don't think it would make a good coop? As I said above, it's in a semi-shady spot right now, as well as being in the best spot we can think of for chickens. So even if we don't convert this one, it will come down and this is likely the spot we'd build a coop from scratch. Any greenhouse we have will go in a spot that actually gets sun in the fall, winter, and spring, not just the summer. I'm assuming the location is probably a big reason why it hasn't been used as a greenhouse in a while by previous owners.
 
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