We went over to Home Depot last night and picked up 70 bags of top soil (2800 lbs worth!!) to fill in the raised beds around the barn and the one next to the front porch that will hide that ramp we put in over there to drive the golf cart up onto the porch where it can be plugged in without taking up space in the garage.
Last night when we left, David was still there at the house putting up the bottom half of those five dutch stall doors -- he said he would be coming back down here to Baton Rouge for a week and a half the end of May and would put the top ones on for us then. Works for me.
Also when he comes back, he's going to take down the bottom ones as well and router lines up and down on each of those doors so that they will look like they're made of 8" boards instead of the actual waterproof plywood once they're painted. That plywood is fastened onto 2 X 4 waterproof boards so those doors are a good 5 inches thick! Then the edges are going to be capped all the way around with U-shaped metal so that the edges aren't visible, and so that the horses can't chew on them! And they'll be painted that same dark teal as those big shutters on the house.
In the meantime, though, we will be able to close those bottom doors to keep the horses in (or out) when needed, but there won't be any real need to have the doors completely closed until hurricanes begin to threaten come high summer, so finishing up next month is fine. Also, because the stall openings are 4 feet wide X nine fee high (instead of 8) he's going to build a screened transom above each 8-foot high door so that even if both the top and bottom doors are locked closed, there will still be air moving through the stalls -- always a good thing in a horse barn! We have a barn ceiling fan up there too that will help with that, but it still needs to be hooked into a permanent electrical line. It was on an extension cord all last summer that has since been disconnected, but the days are getting warmer again these days, so it's about time to get that going again, too.
Anyway, Mark's help, Jerry, gets off at noon on Fridays so the two of them will be putting all that dirt into the beds this afternoon while the weather is still clear. Then starting Sunday it's supposed to be raining most of the week! I guess if we can get all the plants put in there by then, that'll be a GOOD thing - for them, anyway.
Mark and Jerry definitely have their work cut out for them this weekend. Mark also wants to get that temporary electrical fence up to divide the back pasture in half so that he can do some work on the pond/storage building side first. Once the horses are kept away, he's going to do a LOT of things over there -- cut off the bottom branches of all those trees that Duke has been rearing up to eat (!), pick up the pieces of glass and metal around that storage building to be sure none of them either EAT something like that or get something stuck in their hooves. Then he's going to use the power grader to smooth out that side of the pasture. When the ground is wet, the horses feet make lots of holes that are a problem once the ground dries back out. It ends up really rough and the grass gets replaced by weeds in places where it was wet for a while. So once it's smoothed back out, he's going to plant new grass seed. Then a couple months later, we'll turn them back out on that side and do the same to the other half of the pasture. Duke is going to be super pissed initially -- he LOVES going over to that gate on the other side of the house by the garage, and he won't be able to get there once the pasture is divided. Oh well -- that'll be a good way to be sure that temporary fence is effective!
Oh - and the counter top guy called yesterday. He has an opening NEXT WEEK to install the new granite counter tops! Yeaaa!
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