Building a farm: Part 3

(Temporarily) Fixing The Barn

The 60 stall barn already on the property gave us a lot of room to play with. I’ve edited and re-edited the layout a dozen times, figuring out where things should go and where the work should start.

Where will the polo horses stable? We’ll give them 25+ stalls but try to keep them separate from the jumpers. Nothing personal, just a different flow for pretty much everything. Feeding, mucking, exercise times for sets, etc.

Where will the boarders stable? The plan is to open up the barn to additional jumpers and dressage horses this year, so we’ll leave 15+ stalls for that.

Crossties? Tack rooms? Feed rooms? Storage? Laundry? Well we’ll figure it out as we go, I guess.

The thing we knew (even with all of these question marks) was that the barn would need some significant TLC to be livable.

The barn was built for race horses, so not exactly in our style... Bars on all of the stall doors so the horses couldn’t stick their heads out and look around. Dark and dusty. Fluorescent lights. Limited storage.

We had to get the barn ready for 18 polo horses arriving for the summer season. This meant patching the stalls that were in the best shape/seemed the safest on the South side. The barn used to have automatic waterers in all of the stalls which stayed on 24/7. Over time the slow drips from these waterers caused major issues with the wood and metal in each corner of the stalls. To temporarily fix the problems caused by the waterers, we attached plywood planks to the bottomof the stalls. We also cutting off all of the bars on the stall doors, inside and out. Hooks were installed for water buckets, holes in the metal were covered or sanded, rubber stall mats were put in, and we were good to go.