My Horse Barn in Progress

dcyrilc · May 20, 2010

jcaron2 said:
LOL! As you probably remember, we started priming last fall, just in time for the weather to get cold and miserable. It didn't warm up again until a couple of months ago, and we haven't gotten back to it yet.

Spooling the wire that way worked pretty well. I just used a piece of conduit through the 3PH arms with a couple of clamps on the ends to keep it from working its way out. It made life much easier when pulling the wire from the far end of the conduit.

A great idea! Have no doubt that I'm going to steal your idea.:thumbsup: When I was a contractor, before I went to work for the city, I had a rack mounted on my truck. I don't have the truck anymore, but I have a tractor!

jimmyj · May 24, 2010

I just saw this thread for the first time. WOW! What a great job, congratulations! What a gorgeous barn. It was exciting to see the pic of the horse in the stall after reading from page 1.

Neat!:thumbsup:

jcaron2 · May 24, 2010

jimmyj said:
I just saw this thread for the first time. WOW! What a great job, congratulations! What a gorgeous barn. It was exciting to see the pic of the horse in the stall after reading from page 1.

Neat!:thumbsup:

Thanks. It was certainly exciting for us as well!

This weekend I built the first set of dutch doors. They still have to be primed and painted before I hang them, but hopefully they'll look decent once they're up. It was nice to get back to working on stuff that's visible again. The last couple of months have mostly been consumed with stuff that's supposed to be as invisible as possible.

dcyrilc · May 25, 2010

jcaron2 said:
Thanks. It was certainly exciting for us as well!

This weekend I built the first set of dutch doors. They still have to be primed and painted before I hang them, but hopefully they'll look decent once they're up. It was nice to get back to working on stuff that's visible again. The last couple of months have mostly been consumed with stuff that's supposed to be as invisible as possible.

At least you've been working on it. Money's going to have me pretty well shut down this year for ours.

jimmyj · May 26, 2010

Money, what's that? Heard about it once, never seen it since I moved to the country.

Mike_Kanzer · May 27, 2010

The barn and site work look great!
I see that you have the top of the barn open without a hay loft. Do you have a seperate out building to store hay? We have a hay loft which is less than totally desireable ( fire risk) but I don't have a seperate buiding for hay. I have multiple fire extinguishers in barn ( which is good idea in any event to have). - Mike

jcaron2 · May 27, 2010

Mike_Kanzer said:
The barn and site work look great!
I see that you have the top of the barn open without a hay loft. Do you have a seperate out building to store hay? We have a hay loft which is less than totally desireable ( fire risk) but I don't have a seperate buiding for hay. I have multiple fire extinguishers in barn ( which is good idea in any event to have). - Mike

For the time being we have a 48' furniture van trailer for hay storage (you might be able to see it in some of the outside shots of the barn). We can get about 350 bails in that, plus hopefully another 60-70 above each of the two tack rooms in the main barn.

Our plan for now is to put any new hay in the trailer and move existing hay out of the trailer into the barn as needed to make room. It's a pain to move and stack it twice, but that at least insures that only good, dry, well-cured hay goes into the barn.

Once the horse barn's finished, along with some more fencing and various other smaller projects, I'll get to work on a permanent hay shed. Maybe I'll even be able to put in an extra bay or two for the tractor and some implements!

jcaron2 · Jun 15, 2010

I'm happy to report that I've got the wash rack completely functional, along with three of the five horse stalls, including one with a set of dutch doors to an outside paddock.

For the floor drain in the wash rack, I went to a local steel company and had them cut up a chunk of scrap steel bar grating to size for me. It cost me $20, but they got the size perfect to fit into the catch basin. The horses have been standing on it, and it seems to be holding up just fine.

The horses really seem to appreciate being able to look out the open doors of the wash rack while standing there in the cross-ties. It also makes the barn a lot cooler being able to have that door open on the north side.

Some pics:

One of the dutch doors primed and ready for paint:

Some shots of the wash rack:

A couple shots of the dutch doors after installation (sorry, I haven't taken any with one or both closed).

And finally one showing a recent shot of the stall fronts.

jayste · Jun 16, 2010

Very nice. I'm not going to let my wife see this thread 'cause it could create some serious work for me! I bet you've got one happy horsewoman there!:thumbsup:

jcaron2 · Jun 21, 2010

Step 18: Tack Room

It's been one year to the day since I started on the barn!! A year's worth of weekends is a long time, but I feel like I've done okay all in all, especially considering that I've done about 95% of the work by myself.

We now have three horses living in the barn, so I had to finish the tack room/feed room so that we can store grain in a (hopefully) rodent-free environment. SWMBO is getting pretty sick and tired of shlepping back and forth between the house and the barn.

Temperatures in the 90s notwithstanding, this made for a relatively easy weekend. I had to lay the loft floor/tack room ceiling and install a door. I used 3/4" T&G OSB for the floor. I paid almost $20 per sheet which is more than double what I paid for the same material a year ago! I also came to realize that once you discount the tongue, those sheets are only 47.5" wide. That meant that I came up 1.5" short when trying to cover the 12' span.

I made up the difference with a strip of pine that I milled with a matching tongue. In the end, it was probably just as well since the pine has a much nicer looking edge, and I was able to easily round it over so it'll be easier on the shins when climbing up into the loft.

The door was relatively trivial - just a generic steel pre-hung door. Other than ticking off a few wasps that had nested up between the members of the door header, the process was pretty much uneventful.

In the short term, I'm planning to put a wall-mounted AC unit in the tack room. I didn't get to it yet, but I'll hopefully get it done sometime this week. Eventually I'll put drywall or OSB on the walls and ceiling inside the tack room, and I still have to install a utility sink, but those are fairly low on the priority list.

Here are a few pictures: