Ranch Work

We did a lot of ranch work in our first summer.

We built and painted new wood corrals (10 of them).

Next we put down sand and a drainage pipes so the horses feet would stay nice and dry.

We bought giant metal feeding units. They weighed 500 lbs each. We ground down sharp edges, painted them white and installed them in each corral.

We bought a cool retractable ladder with which to climb up to the hay loft from inside the barn.

We built an addition to the barn where our boarders could eat lunch, hang out and shoot the breeze in comfort. We even added water buckets on outside wall so that visiting horses could have a drink too. We call it the Wild Spirit Saloon. Our boarders enjoy it and I'm sure we will too, if we ever get the time.

The Wild Spirit Saloon is a great place to hang out after a ride and chat with friends. Horses have a bucket of water hanging on the side. We don't have to much time to socialize because of...ranch work!

John working with his new toy. A step up from a Tonka truck. Work is a lot more fun with this baby!

This year we are undoing just about everything we did last year.

Wooden corrals are the best and the safest enclosures for horses. But horses sometimes chew them. They can dispose of a whole corral in a couple of years.

We did put the electric wiring on most of fences, but the wires broke during the winter months. We should have fixed the broken ones immediately (a stitch in time saves nine…) but we didn’t. We will get to it...soon.

Here are pictures of our fence before the renovations, right after the renovation and now.

The old fencing was made of wire and ropes. A horse can tangle his foot and severely injure himself.

Here are our newly built fences.

This fence was chewed up in less than a month.