Cold Weather settling in

As the weather gets colder the race is on to finish up the myriad projects that need good weather.  Chuck's list is endless, but the big priorities right now are finishing the 'run in' sheds.  These are mini-barns -- almost like a doublewide for horses.  Here is actually a great picture by Krissy from a rainy day where it is obvious that the horses know what the sheds are for! 

We got this one pre-made from Jeannie that she wasn't using.  Chuck did a ton of figuring and bargaining and ended up determining that we (well, him and David!) could build them for less than half of what we would pay for them pre-built.  Below is a picture of the building in process.  By the end of this week (fingers crossed!!!) we will have three of these.  One in the large back pasture and two in the largest (blue) pasture. 

As of today we have 23 horses and 16 stalls.  Several boarders are here on 'rough board' and some of our horses (Ceasar!) are just as happy outside as in and we have some spots inside the barn where we can feed them.  With the three sheds we should be able to safely feed 6 horses in the pastures and then we can generally feed one horse in each of the smaller paddocks (there are four of those if you count the round pen) so we should just about be able to get through the winter.  (So I guess absolute max capacity is 26 but I am not voting for that)

The second biggest priority is the permanent fencing on the perimeter of the two large paddocks.  Once the leaves come off the trees the horses start to figure out that there are paths up into the woods that might be interesting to take ....  Waking up at 5 or 6 am to a phone call that a horse is loose is NOT a good way to start the day.  And fence posts don't go into the soil easily or straight once there is deep frost in the ground.

If the fencing is done and the weather holds we REALLY want to finish staining the boards and then putting them up on the exterior of the building.  I am sure our neighbors would be happy about that too.  In addition to simply a lot to do and not enough time to do it I will let all readers of this blog entry in on the real reason that we (Chuck) hasn't done this yet.  Risking my questioning of his sanity, he is seriously entertaining a further barn expansion to add four more stalls (see the math above).  He can actually make the whole thing sound really really sane and reasonable which probably means I've gone to the dark horsey side myself.