Through the week . . .

Okay, Mark and I have gotten the barn back to "tidy."  On Monday there was a tornado warning with high winds and off and on heavy rain and high wind, so when the horses got fed on Monday evening, I closed all their gates and locked each of them inside their own paddock.  When it started to storm, they all went into their stalls and stuck their heads out their doors to watch the storm -- nice that they all have porches outside their stalls now so no rain and much less wind blows in there.  But unfortunately, while hanging out there they pooped in their stalls instead of going outside to do it as they generally do.  Well - all but Arthur.  He never does.  Anyway, Mark cleaned it all up by sticking it in the wagons and when I got home I hauled the wagons back to the back and dumped them out then washed them.   Jerry had cleaned off the walls in the stalls last weekend, too, so now everything is completely clean again.  I love that because now no flies are attracted into the place.  I really REALLY like that!

 

Oh - and speaking of flies and bugs . . . we had a company come and treat the house AND the barn for termites, fire ants, and even rats and mice, etc. last week.  So now when Gigi comes home and has her food and all those bones of hers out on the screened porch, there SHOULDN'T be any more ants and mice out there to harass her!  Oh, but before she comes home, we need to get some sort of heavy steel grid of some sort to put across the screens on the bottom half on her porch windows.  We put those things that you can buy for the bottom of screen doors to keep dogs from going through them back when we got Bruce Lee, our Rottweiler, but in Gigi's case she simply broke through all that metal when she saw the other dogs in the dog yard outside her porch!  Gees! 

These are those metal things that (until now!) kept the dogs from jumping up and breaking the screens on the porch.  Of course, this was several years back so that porch is WAY cleaner in this picture than it is now! 
Anyway, two of those metal panels have been broken by Gigi so far.

That's why we need to put something much sturdier on there before she comes home in a week or two.  I don't want her to break the rest of the way through those metal things and go on out through the screen!  So a heavy metal grid is what we need to put up to prevent that.   It may be possible to use these horse gates we had up in the barn before their full-sized doors got installed.

We had these things up before the barn was even completed.  Now there are Dutch doors or French doors on all the stall doors instead of those metal panel things. .

I wonder if we will be able to find those previous stall panels that Mark took down a year or two back.  Maybe they would work on the porch windows, at least for a while anyway.  We probably need to get even heavier metal grids down the road.  But it's possible that Gigi might be able to be told NOT to jump up there now that she's better trained.  Well, maybe.  If not, I hope we manage to keep her from going through the screen until we can get something she CAN'T destroy!

Mark and Jerry also got the gates to the round pen put up last weekend, too.  Now I'm hoping that Jerry will get the round pen posts and that new barn porch painted this coming weekend. 

Once all that is done, I'm planning to get back with Zoilo and see if he can come ride Shadow for me a few times to get her used to being ridden again before I start riding her - just to be on the safe side.  He would also know better than I would whether her saddle and girth are working perfectly for her.

 

Then the only thing left to do on the outside will be find someone to make stair rails for the steps to the front porch and for that ramp over on the side where Mark can drive his golf cart up to the electric outlet on the porch.  We go down that ramp to get to the barn and in the winter it can get really really slippery!  GOT to have a hand rail.

And last night Mark rented a tractor he can use to spread out all those piles of sand he got last week once he levels out the paddocks.  It's going to be a looooong day for him today, that's for sure!  But on the plus side, after all this work he may actually be relieved to get away from home and back to the rig next week!  ;-D