Sorry About This

[bluemoon]

But when I went to let the chickens out at half past five this morning there was a distinct nip in the air; it's made me think about preparing for winter. I want to pop another coat of wood-treatment on the houses, give everywhere a really good scrub and extreme red-mite spray while I can leave the houses open during a warm day to dry out thoroughly. And I still need to get some vinyl floor covering, as Maureen suggested, as I think that will help keep the houses warmer as well as make it easier to clean and dry.
Anything else I should be doing before the weather turns?

[Suechooks]

Make sure you haven't got red mite if you're putting vinyl down. I found some lurking under a sheet of plastic on top of nest boxes. You'll need to seal it really well around edges and joins.

[kirsty b]

Thats a thought, my shed roof needs redoing and the shed could do with a thorough disinfect and coat of preservative too. Will move the babies before I do that though.

[bluemoon]

Make sure you haven't got red mite if you're putting vinyl down. I found some lurking under a sheet of plastic on top of nest boxes. You'll need to seal it really well around edges and joins.

I was thinking about cutting it to fit as closely as possible, then it could be removed regularly and the floor beneath scrubbed with very hot water and disinfectant. Would that not work? The reason I think it will be a good thing to do is that it will give a little more insulation, but won't take too long to dry if we have a week of wet weather and I need to dry the floor quickly. At the moment we just scrub the wooden floor and try to do it on a dry, sunny, breezy day, but days like that are few and far between in winter and even in summer the floor can take an hour or two to dry out thoroughly. I had a similar problem with perches, but now I have two sets and swap them each time, which means the original perches have a week to dry before they're needed again.