Barn progress ...

Okay - our little barn finally has DOORS!   It's beginning to feel like a real building!

If you walk in that front door and look to your left, here's that space (the door on the right goes out to that side porch on the left in the picture above):

And walking in the front door and looking to your right, there's this incredible pile of "stuff" at the moment.  But eventually there will be a LOT of storage space.

If you go straight ahead through the door on the left in the photo above, that's going to be where the sink and feed containers and shelving unit with all kinds of brushes, hoof picks, fly sprays, shampoos, skin treatments, and all kinds of other health items will be.  (And a lamp at the moment since there's no ceiling fixture yet.)

If you continue straight ahead, you will come to the door from the feed room into the little hall off of which the three stalls open.  I love that that door has windows so I'll be able to  see the horses from inside.

That wall between Duke's and Lizzie's stalls in these pictures is a temporary divider just made of two sheets of plywood.  The actual wall will be thick enough to contain a water line and there will be a grid of some sort above the divider to keep Duke from leaning over and nipping at Lizzie's butt!  We had only two steel grid doors when the horses came home, so Lizzie has only a single chain across her stall but there's no problem keeping her in with that.  (If Duke were in that stall now that would be a whole different ball game!  He would probably be in the feed room!)

Anyway, below is the current barn layout. 

It's going to work so well.  We will have that 10 X 12 center tack room where the sink is going to be AND that entire 8 X 28 front enclosed porch to store all the "stuff" that's currently piled in one half of our livingroom -- and for that matter, scattered all over the rest of the house.  Can't WAIT to get to the point where I can start hauling all that stuff out to that barn.   

We're still making changes as we go, though.  For instance, once we got the horses home we discovered that no matter where you put their food, Duke and Lizzie like to  stand facing the exterior doors - which means all their piles of poo end up in the interior corners right by the doors into that center hall. That's where we WERE going to put their feed containers and waterers.  Now the plan is to put them over near the outside doors - where they're facing most of the time anyway.  I feel sorry for anyone who buys the place and has horses who try and kick, though.  It's no problem for us, but putting food into a stall with a schizy horse could be something of a problem.  Oh well -- not OUR problem.

I hope by this time next year the place will have been finished for long enough that all this hard work during this horrendous heat wave will be just a really nasty memory for Mark!