#barnbuilding

My dad, brother, and I have been so busy setting up our 5-acre property for horses.

Having worked with horses for about 10 years now, I always had the dream of being able to wake up in the morning and greet the horses right from the front door. Well, not right in front, but a short walking distance away!

Since I will be writing about the entire process from planning to the finished barn/fence projects, I decided to split my blogs into four different parts: 1) Planning, 2) Fencing, 3) Sacrifice Paddock, and 4) Barn.

So, we’ll start with 1) Planning. This is where your math class starts to get important.

During the Planning Stage, I had to take a look at what I had to work with. I had a 5-acre property and, luckily, there was 3-board black fence around the entire perimeter. I had a nice hill to work with as well as some flat land. Having worked at several barns around the area, and abroad, I saw time after time that poor pasture management leads to very little to no grass yield, and the potential for mud. This made me think about making a sacrifice area for when the weather was too rainy and muddy, but also to keep the horses on grass and the sacrifice paddock 50/50.

I bought Cherry Hill’s Horse Keeping on Small Acreage and tried to get an idea of some of the barn plans in the book. Unfortunately, the book seems to gear towards people with a bottomless bank account and I wanted to be as frugal as possible. It did offer some good information and I was able to get the gears working in my head to really plan out what kind of buildings and other structures I wanted on the property.

I eventually decided on several things: electric fencing, a fairly large sacrifice paddock, and a carport.

I chose to do electric fencing because it is the cheapest, I chose to have a sacrifice paddock because of what I explained two paragraphs up, and I decided on a carport because of the price as well. Because I wanted to have 2 to 3 horses, I planned accordingly. I will go into more detail about each as my blogs progress.

And finally, due to my dad’s and my own working schedule, we only had Saturday afternoons to work together on our massive project. Because of this, I knew that the project would take several months. Sometimes it was only my dad with my brother that worked while I was at my multiple jobs.

I will be going into a fair amount of detail for the posts and will add lots of pictures so stayed tuned!

And can't forget the best helper of all...Toby!