I was thinking about how the urine of the chickens soak into the wood flooring making it hard to clean and get rid of the smell. So with rabbit hutches, goat and horse stalls. The idea of vinyl flooring popped into my mind. It would make cleaning simple. Even lining the walls for really messy animals. The only thing is you would need to put enough hay or sawdust down so the animals wouldn't slip. I did a google and found out I'm not the first to think of it for chicken coops, but I don't know if anyones done it for other animal housing.
We did this when we kept our rabbits in a shed. Just used a piece of linoleum a little larger than the dimensions of the floor. We didnt' secure it, just laid it so it would curl up on the sides and at the side opposite the one door. Our rabbit cages were suspended, so we scattered a bale of straw on the floor. Cleaned it out about every 3-6 months (not as frequently during the winter). It worked great! When we were finished, we just rolled up the linoleum and threw it away. You can get remanents fairly cheap and although I do dislike waste, this linoleum was ...... too.... pungent to be used ever again in any way!
If you are worried about slipping besides the bedding you can always "rough up" the surface with fine sandpaper. If you run vinyl up the walls you can caulk the edges together and have a real easy hose out surface. You can get fancy and "weld" the edges of vinyl with a low-heat torch. You just take a thin slicing of vinyl and use it like a welding rod. Yeah, that's actually to much work but it sure would be fancy.
It is often used for flooring in reptile habitats, it works great, to contain wet poops. I plan it put it in our under ground chicken house when we get it built.
vinyl sounds like a real time-saver come clean up time - thumper, how about a little more than a tease about your "underground chicken coop" - sounds interesting
I have used it in both my chicken coop and also goat barn. I live in Maine and very cold winter nights make the flooring very brittle. It eventually starts to break apart. The goats will also pull the flooring up, so you would have to secure the sides, I have used strips of wood. I am lucky enough that mine are litter trained and only mess on one corner of the barn- I know, pure luck. That corner is covered and a 6X6 lays across the corner to keep the dirty litter there. Home depot sells 8X10 rolls for around $20, well worth it for a coop.. But really not worth it for larger animals.
when we built our chicken coop we just left the dirt floor. Seems easier just to put new wood shavings down and clean the coop flooring out a few times a year. I would think it would get slick to walk on for people never mind the animals...and would water freeze on it too. Would you be using the no wax flooring ?? (just kidding...getting another snow storm and my mind is getting goofy now !!)
My chicken house has both wood & dirt floors (2 sections). Niether stink, but the dirt is "self cleaning". That is, as the chickens scratch, they turn over the surface, but we still clean it out otherwise the floor level would get way too high! God bless, Bonnie
just don't use the self stick squares, i used them before i knew better, and they are NOT sticky enough to withstand the abuse of scraping chicken poo off of. they started to come unstuck in less than a year and after 2 years they're completely gone. they did make it easier for cleanup when they were in place. i think the solid sheet would be ok though. p.s. i don't think vinyl is good for the environment, however, if you're using remnants that's at least keeping waste out of a landfill. but vinyl is one of the nastier things man has created. sorry
I used to clean dirt bottem horse stalls and they were the worst to get clean. You had to really dig it up and then level it off. I preferd cleaning the cement bottem stalls. Some of those had rubber mats to make cleaning easier and provide a little more softer footing. The vinyl would give a bit of cushion too but be cheaper then those rubber matts. I live up in the north and most people keep their coops up off the ground to keep the coops warmer. I think the air flow underneath helps? I wonder though for the ones on the ground if having a gravel floor would be more drainy. I can see a problem with the vinyl cracking in the winter in unheated barns and coops but if your layering bedding over bedding then wouldn't it become warm underneath? My father says when he was a kid, their chickens only home was under the porch!
Our chicken coop has a floor made from a plastic sign. It is a corrugated plastic material just like a piece of crdboard. It was 2 4x8 signs from a housing development that I scrounged when making the coop. It works great and is easy to clean. We keep the floor covered in wood shavings. Our chicken house is on stilts and you just put the wheel barrow next to the door and rake the floor into the wheel barrow to clean it.
