Our First Horse

I was snapping pictures one day and accidentally caught Moonshine changing positions to walk the other way. The picture makes it look like she’s crossing her legs.

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Over the past year we’ve spent time mending horse fences. Some repairs worked, some didn’t last. Here’s what we’ve learned:

• Screws work better than nails. Eventually nails creep out, especially since horses tend to lean against fence boards pretty hard. At least ours do.
• When using screws, drill pilot holes first. Otherwise you end up with wood splitting. In fact, many of the boards that were nailed in actually split from the nail.
• Have spares - never know when you need them, such as in the middle of the night. There have been a few times this year when we heard a loud bang outside and it turned out the horses had broken a fence board. It’s important to have spares around for emergency repairs.
• Save broken fence pieces for other repairs. We occasionally have a break in the middle of our 12 foot fence boards. We’ll take the two halves and trim them for use as center supports.
• Center supports work and look nice. A center support is simply a small section of board attached across the center of the three fence boards. Lots of people don’t use them but I find our 12 foot sections tend to sag over time in the middle. The center support ties the three boards together in the middle to prevent that and to spread the force of a horse leaning on the middle across all three boards. They also look nice.
• Fences are expensive! We discovered our 3 board fence costs about $40 per 12 foot section. That really adds up when you’re looking to put in 150 foot of fencing. We may need to replace a few sections of barbed wire fence at a time.

I have an idea for a fence strengthening brace that might also look really nice. The idea came to me while I brainstormed about how to save the fence boards that had split at their nail holes. I wanted to see if there was a way I could repair them using easy-to-find and inexpensive hardware items. What I came up with is a simple piece of flat steel brace with three holes in it. If I screw the fence boards into the posts through one of these, it would spread the grip of those three screws across the entire brace, essentially clamping the board onto the post. And if I painted it black and maybe rounded the corners, it would like nice against the wood. Here’s my concept photo:

The braces should cost less than $.50 each, or about $3 per 12 foot section. I’m still toying with the idea but I’m thinking about trying it on a small section of fence to see what it looks like.

Other posts about fence mending:

Fence Mending (12/06)
More Fence Mending (2/07)

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Okay, I admit it. I struggled with certain subjects in school, such as math and physics. But I’m pretty good at spatial relationships and figuring out what can fit where (I’m a mean packer - especially after 10 moves in 12 years - and I can fit more in a freezer than the average person can). But this one stumps me. Take a 16.2-hand, 1200-pound horse and put him in a 12×12 stall with a bucket of feed. Let him position himself in his favorite spot in the corner. Now stand off to the side of the window about a foot and say “Abracadabra!” (Okay, “abracadabra” is optional.) And ta-da! No horse! It’s amazing!

I don’t know why he has to hide to eat, but there you have it.

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Okay, life is a little too serious at the moment so how about some fun? Moonshine likes to chase Valentine. Valentine likes to run full bore towards the fence and then slam on the brakes at the last minute. In this picture it looks like Moonshine might have been following a little too closely. I don’t think she ran into him but the picture sure looks like a rear end collision! He has never actually hit the fence or the barn to my knowledge. The fence and barn wall is just to the right of this cropped photo.

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We’ve had a death in the family. We’ll be back posting shortly.

Thanks,
Bill

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You may have noticed that there have been almost no ads on our blog. It’s been this way for well over a year now. We have a few Google ads that appear at the bottom of our links list and if you search for something and no results are returned, you get a Google search box. But other than that there have been no ads. We also haven’t been sponsored by anyone or paid to write a product or service review. We didn’t start Our First Horse to make lots of money. The objective of this blog was to force us to document the experience, for our own benefit. If anyone else is entertained along the way or learns something with us, great!

But as anyone who operates a blog like this knows, there are expenses when running a website. They’re not very high but we lease a dedicated server and that cost comes out of our pockets each month. To help recoup that expense we’ve thought of selling some advertising space. We looked at all kind of blogs and other websites for ideas on how many ads to have on each page and what layouts were attractive. The problem is, most websites and blogs have LOTS of advertising. Too much. We never want our readers to have to wade through advertising to see our articles and posts. We’ve decided we’re going to experiment with just a few ads here and there. Small, unobtrusive and hopefully complimentary to the theme of our site.

Starting as early as today you might see a small ad at the top of our menu and another small ad at the bottom of the site near the footer. At some point you may see us review a few products that we’re paid to review. We promise: 1) there won’t be many, 2) we’ll pick relevant products/services, 3) we’ll be 100% objective (even if it costs us the sponsorship) and 4) we’ll clearly mark paid reviews. We’ll never try to trick you.

Most blogs have advertising so this probably isn’t a surprise to you. We’ve resisted for as long as we could but we’re caving in gracefully and with a commitment to keep it to a minimum.

Thanks for understanding (we hope you do) and if you see something of interest in these ads, remember that viewing and clicking them helps us and them.

Finally, if you have a horse-related product/service or something complimentary to the horse lifestyle and you’d like information about advertising on the Our First Horse blog, please contact us.

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