The barn

Chad is beyond excited to have a workshop and I am beyond excited to have a barn for animals. Chad was still in Texas at this time dying to be at the farm. The barn was quite a hot mess when we purchased it but it just needed some love. There was a room in the barn that we could not look in before purchasing because the owners had so much stuff in it that we could not get in there. The room is about 8 1/2 ft by 12 ½ ft. We call it the tool room. It was honestly the least intimidating room to tackle first. We took everything out of it, swept the walls, ceiling, shelves, and floor to get rid of the abundance of cob webs, saw dust, old feed, and just all-around grossness. We found am old exercise bike, and some old rusted horse shoes.

Payton had already started in the big bay working on clearing out old rotting straw that was piled up for who knows how long. I had her start wheel barreling it to the big horse bay to use for compost in the garden once we get the Polaris fixed. This part will take a few days to complete it was quite a bit and was heavy scooping it up and hauling it. We moved some of the totes of tools, and garage type stuff into the big bay after sweeping out some of the cobwebs, and sweeping off the counters and my dad started putting some of the guy stuff in the tool room. It is all starting to come together little by little. I knew Chad was very excited about the workshop areas so I wanted to get them a little cleaned up for when he got there.

Now, the third bay of the shop was quite a mess. It had been used in the past as a Farrier shop (horse shoeing). And it was piled almost to the ceiling with trash and treasure. We thought, dang this is going to take a few days and we started to get busy. Slowly and carefully, we started pulling out trash, and interesting tools, more horse shoes, more trash, buggy parts, metal gates, animal troughs, chairs, more trash, wood, gas cans, broken insulation boards, tomato cages, even tires, both wooden and rubber oh and more trash! I really thought the Amish would have been a bit cleaner than this but that’s what I get for making assumptions. We began to wonder after getting a lot of the stuff out of the room if the floor was dirt or if it was concrete like the rest of the shop and barn.

I got out my handy dandy German snow shovel and started scraping up 3-4 inched of composted horse poop off the concrete slab. I started putting it into the wheel barrel and sifting through it to remove trash and metal debris so it could be used in the garden as well. 90% of the floor was covered with the composted poo/trash mixture. We continued to chip away and get it clean. Once we were able to open up the bay doors 2 kittens came to visit us. One was super friendly and Hunter named him Rick. The other one was very skittish and didn’t really want any attention at all. Rick hung around the remainder of the day and we had no idea where he came from. But it was a nice breath of fresh air to have him around and he was quite curious to see what we were doing and had a blast exploring around the barn. Hunter stepped on some glasss while cleaning up but luckily it wasn’t bad. We like to work in sandals, they are more comfy but not practical. Oops! Glad there was no stitches or anything but a foot soak and a band-aid.

My mom kept us hydrated as we worked on the barn and checked on us to see how we were doing. We had bagged so much trash up, had a pile of both good and rotten wood, a pile of trash that couldn’t be bagged up and, a pile of insulation board for trash and kept some that were still good, and then a pile of cool gadgets to check out on a later day. The bay was finally cleaned out, man what an accomplishment.

After working on that all day, I decided to clean out one of the stalls in the barn, it had a stall mat in it and more piled up manure and hay. I scooped up the what I could and then we moved the stall mat. The smell was putrid, it was slimy with manure and urine. We drug it out of the barn and scrubbed it down. We ran a hose down from the house to use to help clean it since we hadn’t fixed the water to the barn yet. We finished scrubbing the stall out, removed more cobwebs, and dirt dobber nests then sprayed out the stall. It is so rewarding to work on your own farm.