Hey! Long time no hear, glad to know you are still around!
The birds will travel with us on a ship - I already did my homework on this. There are three lines of container ships that stop in my country and have a few cabins for passengers. They are not as fancy or comfortable as liners but I could take one large cabin or two smaller ones for us and the birds. And the containers with our car and all the house stuff we are bringing with us will travel on the same ship, too [we have a friend who owns a company that does this kind of container shipping stuff and he is going to handle the whole thing]. The dogs and cats will travel in batches by air, accompanied by me or my husband, with the exception of the golden retriever which will need to travel in cargo because of his large size.
Dust from the soil won't be a problem at all. For one thing, it's humid, for another, I an always turn on the humidifier and last but not least, there will be plants there and the roots 'hold' the dirt down.
And no, no, no, my birds won't be outdoors all year round - no way no how! Average temperature is fine but the nights can get cold and, because it's humid, the chill factor makes a normally 'nice' temperature feel much colder. For another, we will be living far from the city so there will be predators.
And I am pretty sure that the room will work because, when I was a child, there was this neighbor across the street from us that had a similar room in her house. The lady's name was Kitty, she was a judge and her husband was a high ranking military [I think he was a general, actually] and, although she was considered highly eccentric by the neighbors and my family [she had gone to high school and preparatory with two of my mother's cousins], I thought she was the greatest because she had lots and lots of plants and lots and lots of cats she took in from the street. The room was smack in the middle of the house and had regular walls but not a single window so the entire ceiling was a huge pyramidal skylight that moved on rails on the roof and could be opened or closed with a crank thingie on the wall [it looked like this:
http://www.infocasas.com.uy/casas-en-ci ... a/285478?v]. It was, basically, like a Spanish interior courtyard only it had a movable, skylight ceiling! The center of the room had tiles with a drainage thingie smack in the middle so, even when it rained, it did not flood and a wide strip of just dirt all around with plants and even two trees [one of them was a star jasmine and I've wanted one for my own ever since because, in the summer, the scent from the flowers perfumed the entire house and could be smelled as soon as you walked through the street door!] It was similar to this, only with the movable glass ceiling and no fancy furniture
:https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=23bI4w6R&id=ABB03B7D3E01EB75BA774500C1B038F38238619F&thid=OIP.23bI4w6R2lIZbiNKfKhHYAEsDw&q=spanish+interior+courtyard+pictures&simid=608006601642411525&selectedIndex=213&ajaxhist=0