Ever since last spring I’ve been itching to start renovating the barn. I have envisions of a perfectly clean, categorized barn, complete with Knotty-pine walls and a primitive theme.
However, our Barn is currently a royal mess! It has not served a livestock purpose for the last 20 years and has been used mainly as a storage facility for miscellaneous stuff around the farm including gardening supplies, half a gym set and airplane and snowmobile parts. This last week I have been stirring around in the barn, cleaning up and taking loads of “once a upon a times” to the dump.
Our Barn was originally built and designed (by my father in-law) for miniature horses, close to 30 head at a time. So the barns design is a bit miniature, it’s not a miniature barn, it’s just not suited for a herd of milk cows (Yet). Theres only one miniature horse left on our farm and he doesn’t require much room and is not very active at 28 years old, so I feel comfortable changing the barn from a miniature horse barn into a general livestock barn.
Today’s task consisted of cleaning up and prepping it for the winter. As in, loading it full of organic alfalfa hay and enough Homemade chicken feed to last till spring. Nothing is worse than carrying a 50 pound bag of grain in the snow, down the sloped backyard, through the pasture and into the barn. So I need to make sure that I am organized and my barn is fully stocked until the last of the snowfall around April or May. While preparing for a spring calf at the same time.
My “milking parlor” currently consists of bags of soft bedding chips, scrap wood and spare pieces of molding for our house. None of which belong in a milking parlor. Wanna see..?
So with a little help from my husband and father-in-law, the barn is starting to shape up. The junk is being sorted and disposed of and alfalfa is stacked. I can start to see the beginning of my idealistic barn in the works!
Now, back to my sketch board.
