Grow Your Own Magazine

This weekend sees some adjustment to my coop so I can fit an up and down sliding pop hole (and automatic opener if it gets her in time) and give them a bit more hadroom so they can roost properly and make the roof sloped.. My question is, what to put on the roof to waterproof it..? I keep seeing everywhere about orduline, but I'm not sure this will work with my plan to have the whole roof hinged at the bottom of the slope so I can open it for cleaning and eg collecting so any ideas are welcome, I know roofing felt is out, is there any other flatter material than the orduline (or does it come un corrugated?) or would wood be ok..? There should be a couple of plans attached showing how it is now and how it's going to be, any suggestions are very welcome

whoops no attachment.. too big, I tried it with just the new coop pic and thats too big too, but essentially all I'm doing is changing it from a box with a flat, plywood roof to a box with a slopey roof..

Hi Becka,

at the poultry centre they have chicken houses with pointy wooden roof and the slopey ones.

The slopey ones have Onduline on them You can get it in sheets from Wickes and it is corrugated. Its green on outside and underneath has bitumen. Apparently redmite don't like it, whereas with felt, they get underneath it in between the layer and breed.

You can still have the onduline hinged on a slopey roof as that's what I have seen. You fix the onduline to a wooden batten which you put hinges on.

Thanks, I'll go take a look, I'm should be able to make it work somehow

Important detail with Onduline. Unless the roof slope is steep, you either need a sheet of plywood under it, or battens fairly close together. If you want a hinged roof, I would use a sheet of plywood, (or maybe a wooden frame made of battens) and hinge THAT, then add the Onduline to the plywood/frame, with a bit of an overhang (may sound obvious, but better to state the obvious than leave something out). Remember to put the fixings through the RIDGES of the Onduline, not the VALLEYS.....

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Flowers come in too many colours to see the world in black-and-white.

I managed to get some, tho it went under a different trade name (bit-something?) but sounded like the same stuff, corrugated with bitumen underneath and green top.. i hope that's right as was very hard to get into the car :P it's ever so slightly narrower than my coop annoyingly so i'm definatly going to make a frame, possibly with a bit of spare ply for stiffening, it will probably evolve as we put it together but i have a reasonable idea what i'm going to do now I think, hopefully by this time tomorrow the chooks will be enjoying a lovely extended pad..