Talked to a vet tech yesterday who advertised on CraigsList that she does pet sitting. She has a website call Love 'em & Leave 'em Pet Care, as well. So I e-mailed her to see what her fees would be for dealing with all nine of our animals twice a day! Well, when I talked with her on the phone I found out her fees will be even lower than Torri's were AND she'll be happy to groom the horses as well as feed them every day! When she told me that, I asked her if she would come by sometime in the next week or two and help me bathe and groom all three of them. That's next to impossible for me using only one arm at the moment! And she said she would. She'll probably be coming by next Sunday. She already has plans for the holiday weekend but next weekend she'll be happy to come over. Wonderful! Can't WAIT!
AND we found a company who is happy to make U-channels for the edges of those Dutch stall doors to protect the door edges from both water AND the horses. So Mark hauled one of those Dutch door panels over to Nat (at Custom Metal Works over on Hooper Road) so he could measure everything and be sure he would get those channels to fit precisely. He's making them out of stainless steel for just $20 each! Fantastic!
So Jerry has been coming by all weekend to help Mark get all those doors made up. They'll be cutting those new doors in half horizontally and making them into Dutch doors, then cutting multiple pieces of plywood in half vertically and making those into French doors. Then they used wood filler to fill in any openings and cover the screws holding the two sheets of plywood together for the French doors. When they get all that taken care of and everything is the correct size and sanded down and cleaned and ready to prepare for installation, it'll be my turn to go out and prime and paint them all.
Once they're painted, Jerry and Mark will go ahead and put on those giant 10" hinges and the door handles and then they can get them all installed. That probably won't happen until next weekend. But I can hope it might get done by the end of this weekend because if it does, then next week we could get Jerry to clean all the dirt off the trim boards on the edges of the barn roof so that we can get them all painted. Once they're painted, then we'll finally be able to get that company we talked with a couple months back to come out and install the gutters and downspouts. I seriously hope that once all that's done it will stop being so darned muddy all around the barn! I read somewhere recently that a 1000 square foot roof produces more than 600 gallons of runoff for every 1" of rain that falls on it!! And that's exactly how large the roof is on that barn. No wonder that area is such a mess!
So the next process, I think, will be taking up all those grids and mats off the ground outside the barn, leveling the ground back out and tamping it down level, then putting down a layer of sand and then big concrete stepping stones on top of that. That, combined with the gutters, SHOULD help make the place a lot tidier and the horses' hooves a lot less mucky. Maybe we can use those grids and mats on the paths out through their gates instead. There's not nearly as much water out there as there is coming off the roof of the barn so they should work better there -- and it would make it much easier for us to go out and open and close those gates without having to put on boots.
Then down the road, we need to get the cement board siding and the rest of the trim on the barn cleaned up, then it can finally be painted, too. (So far, we've only painted the front of the barn. It would be nice to have the whole thing looking decent -- although it's not nearly as important as having sturdy doors in case of a hurricane.)
Okay - onward and upward.
No comments:
Post a Comment