new loft plans

[fastpitch dad]

Well as you have guessed I'm new to the site and pigeon raceing.
I've had pigeons for a couple of years and thought I would get my two girls into raceing them, as a reward for helping me take care of them.
Anyway here are my plans PLEASE give me input because I'm new to this. I changed the young bird side to 4x8 rather than 8x8 to make it easier to catch.

[Lovebirds]

Originally Posted by fastpitch dad

Well as you have guessed I'm new to the site and pigeon raceing.
I've had pigeons for a couple of years and thought I would get my two girls into raceing them, as a reward for helping me take care of them.
Anyway here are my plans PLEASE give me input because I'm new to this. I changed the young bird side to 4x8 rather than 8x8 to make it easier to catch.

Well, it's a START!!! .........
The first thing you need to do is figure out how serious you want to be with racing and how many birds you'll need to race/compete in your area. Since I already know where you are and who you'll be racing with, I can tell you that less than 50 young birds and you're behind the eight ball already.
Then you have to figure out what happens with the Old Birds.......how are you going to race them? Natural, widowhood, double widowhood, etc.......
Then, what about your breeders? Do you intend to keep them together all year or are you going to separate them during the non-breeding season?
Do you prefer to have all your birds in one big building or can you or do you want separate lofts for the different birds?
I will tell you and EVERYONE here who races will tell you, that planning is the key. Looking at the future and I mean long term rather than the next year or two will save you lots of work. And THEN, I haven't found a fancier yet who was 100% satisfied with what he/she built. After it's all said and done, for the next ???? years, you'll say, "I should have done this or that"..........
We built a loft when we were in MI. The paint wasn't even dry before we were knocking down a wall and adding on............then we moved to VA. We planned and planned and planned some more, before we built our big loft, only to build ANOTHER loft the next year..........
Not trying to present you with "gloom and doom", but the more you can plan and figure out BEFORE you build, the better off you will be.

[fastpitch dad]

Well I'm not planning on raceing every race it's more of a way for my girls to race one another. So i shouldn't need the number of birds it would take to race a full season.
They like nameing and picking out their on birds .
As you can tell with my name we are real involved with softball.
That's why we wouldn't be raceing them all.
since you know who I will be raceing with you also know it's about an hour's drive to the club. So about half the races will do for now.
As far as building, I'm in the building industry, com. and res. so the building part will be the easy thing for me. The pigeons will be the hard part.

[psychopigeon]

Here is what I think I'd do if building the loft. I kept the overall dimensions of the loft itself the same, but changed the setup. I like options in a loft, so that's what I tried to do in this design.

Sections 1, 2, 3,4 - 7' x 4 1/2'
Hallway between sections 1, 2 & 3, 4 - 3 ' wide
Entryway - 4' wide
Breeders - each section 6' x 6'

I made this setup so you can have options, you can see there are doors everywhere, but they all give you more options