My Horse Barn in Progress

[jcaron2]

Very nice. I sure wish our ground was dry enough to work this time of year.

Cyril, the ground's pretty soft here too right now. Lots of rain and slowly melting snow have kept everything pretty soupy for the last month and a half. My wife finally got sick enough of trudging through the mud to get hay, dump manure, and turn out horses, that she put her foot down and forced me to get this done now. Unfortunately that meant I had to spread all that gravel with the tractor, rather than having the dumptruck driver do it the easy way.

It's a lot more work this way, since I can't spread it nearly as smoothly as the truck by just dumping it out of the bucket as I go. So I end up having to smooth it out carefully with a box blade (being extra careful not to let the blade get down to the soft clay underneath) after I get it roughly spread with the bucket. But the good news is that I'm able to build the road as I go, so I never have to do much driving off the road. That way I don't end up tearing up the soft ground.

Unlike you, though, I can look forward to things drying out by late April (and for a week or two here or there in between). You can get back to work in July!

 

[dcyrilc]

Cyril, the ground's pretty soft here too right now. Lots of rain and slowly melting snow have kept everything pretty soupy for the last month and a half. My wife finally got sick enough of trudging through the mud to get hay, dump manure, and turn out horses, that she put her foot down and forced me to get this done now. Unfortunately that meant I had to spread all that gravel with the tractor, rather than having the dumptruck driver do it the easy way.

It's a lot more work this way, since I can't spread it nearly as smoothly as the truck by just dumping it out of the bucket as I go. So I end up having to smooth it out carefully with a box blade (being extra careful not to let the blade get down to the soft clay underneath) after I get it roughly spread with the bucket. But the good news is that I'm able to build the road as I go, so I never have to do much driving off the road. That way I don't end up tearing up the soft ground.

Unlike you, though, I can look forward to things drying out by late April (and for a week or two here or there in between). You can get back to work in July!

Yea, we're pretty wet this year. Most summers, by August, I can dig down 4-5 feet before finding water. Sometimes deeper. Last summer we never really stopped raining. I was lucky to get to 18" without having standing water in the ditch/hole and then fall and winter came again. My son grabbed one of our old aquariums a few days before Halloween because he wanted to bring it home. I took a picture of it yesterday. Now keep in mind that the top of the aquarium is not completelly open so there has to have been more rainfall in the last couple of months than just what got in the tank.

 

[jcaron2]

Yea, we're pretty wet this year. Most summers, by August, I can dig down 4-5 feet before finding water. Sometimes deeper. Last summer we never really stopped raining. I was lucky to get to 18" without having standing water in the ditch/hole and then fall and winter came again. My son grabbed one of our old aquariums a few days before Halloween because he wanted to bring it home. I took a picture of it yesterday. Now keep in mind that the top of the aquarium is not completelly open so there has to have been more rainfall in the last couple of months than just what got in the tank.
View attachment 195878

Wow! That's some serious rain! On the bright side, you can be glad that didn't all fall as snow!

 

[Pixguy]

Wow, I plan on building an equipment garage in the spring and searched for garges & barns and came across this thread.

You should be very proud of your work, great attention to detail and some great homemade items as well!:thumbsup:

Best of luck to you, your wife and the horses, they're lucky!

Now sit and have a cold drink!:drink:

 

[jcaron2]

Wow, I plan on building an equipment garage in the spring and searched for garges & barns and came across this thread.

You should be very proud of your work, great attention to detail and some great homemade items as well!:thumbsup:

Best of luck to you, your wife and the horses, they're lucky!

Now sit and have a cold drink!:drink:

Thanks, Pixguy! Good luck on your equipment garage. I've got to build one of those too one of these days.

 

[JeremyL]

Very nice thread, pictures and barn. Thanks for sharing.
Now that you have lived with it for a few years, anything you would do differently?
-JeremyL.

 

[Thats Hot]

Great thread and a very nice build..

 

[jcaron2]

Very nice thread, pictures and barn. Thanks for sharing.
Now that you have lived with it for a few years, anything you would do differently?
-JeremyL.

Honestly, there's almost nothing I'd change. I've been really happy with it (and more importantly, so has my wife... and the horses).

One thing I should have done was run a CAT5 cable underground along with the power cable while I had the trench dug. Five years ago, I wouldn't have dreamed I'd ever need an internet connection out in the barn. But now we have an ethernet security camera so we can check in on the horses in their stalls at night or when we're away from home. I also plan to add a second camera overlooking the riding arena so I can check in on the wife while she's riding all by herself while I'm at work. Since the barn is about 500 feet from the house, it's a stretch to get a signal from the wireless router in the house. I have it working now with a wireless repeater, but the bandwidth is pretty low. I could spend a couple hundred bucks for a wireless point-to-point system with a high-gain antenna, but it would have been much easier and cheaper to have just run a cable in the first place.

One other thing that I did change was the way I routed the main water line to the tack room. Originally I ran the water to the south wall of the barn (which involved the least amount of digging). I ran it up the south wall then over the aisleway along the rafters and down the other side into the tack room on the north side. The problem I found was that during the heat of the summer, the water in that line got scorching hot since it ran right up next to the roof. So the horses were getting hot water in their automatic waterers. I ended up digging a trench all the way around to the north side of the barn and coming up directly into the tack room that way. Now the water temperature is MUCH better.

 

[dcyrilc]

Honestly, there's almost nothing I'd change. I've been really happy with it (and more importantly, so has my wife... and the horses).

One thing I should have done was run a CAT5 cable underground along with the power cable while I had the trench dug. Five years ago, I wouldn't have dreamed I'd ever need an internet connection out in the barn. But now we have an ethernet security camera so we can check in on the horses in their stalls at night or when we're away from home. I also plan to add a second camera overlooking the riding arena so I can check in on the wife while she's riding all by herself while I'm at work. Since the barn is about 500 feet from the house, it's a stretch to get a signal from the wireless router in the house. I have it working now with a wireless repeater, but the bandwidth is pretty low. I could spend a couple hundred bucks for a wireless point-to-point system with a high-gain antenna, but it would have been much easier and cheaper to have just run a cable in the first place.

One other thing that I did change was the way I routed the main water line to the tack room. Originally I ran the water to the south wall of the barn (which involved the least amount of digging). I ran it up the south wall then over the aisleway along the rafters and down the other side into the tack room on the north side. The problem I found was that during the heat of the summer, the water in that line got scorching hot since it ran right up next to the roof. So the horses were getting hot water in their automatic waterers. I ended up digging a trench all the way around to the north side of the barn and coming up directly into the tack room that way. Now the water temperature is MUCH better.

Did you ever come up with a solution to your wireless issue?

 

[jcaron2]

Hi Cyril! I ended up buying a pair of cheap wireless routers (TP-Link TL-WR841N at $19 on Amazon). They use a standard called "WDS Wireless Bridge" where you can use one router as a repeater for the other. I put one in the house, looking out a window towards the barn, and I put the other in the barn looking out a doorway where it can see the house. I was pretty doubtful that it would work, but I figured I give it a try. Even though they're 500 feet apart, the signal strength is still 15-20 dB higher than the bare minimum, so it works pretty well. Now I can roam between the house and the barn, and my phone, computer, etc. stay connected and have internet access the whole time.