About Our Barn

About Our Barn

We moved to Tennessee from Arizona. It’s not that we didn’t like Arizona but there were some things in Tennessee Mikki in particular wanted to experience. She wanted to be surrounded by greenery, have a garden (for the first time ever!), experience rivers with actual water in them…and to possibly own her own horse. We had been traveling to east Tennessee for years to visit family and on our final trip as visitors, we looked at some property with Mikki’s parents who were looking to retire soon. We happened upon the property where we live now and loved it from the start. Almost 8.5 acres, mostly fenced for horses with two barns, including a mostly new barn with three finished horse stalls, room for hay storage, a tack room and a covered port for storing a horse trailer. Perfect! Honestly, I think the barn is what sold the place. Nine months later, Valentine showed up and the rest we’ve been blogging about since February 2006.

After more than seven years of blogging about our horse experience, I realize I’ve never gone into much detail about the barn. And since I have some things I want to do to the barn and I’ll want to write about those things, it seems like you need to know the basics.

Our Barn

Our barn has three finished horse stalls, one semi-finished stall with room for five total. We initially used two unfinished stalls for storage and had no intention on having more than three horses but then Romeo and Cash came along so we cleaned out one of the storage stalls. Romeo occupied that stall  for a while but now it belongs to Jazzy the mule. We plan to replace the metal gate (which Romeo got his head stuck in years ago) we use as a wall with a full wooden wall. The barn is open in the center aisle and the aisle is big enough to drive a truck, hay wagon or tractor through. At this point we don’t have doors on the ends but it’s an addition we’re planning. In the winter it’s darn cold in there and it would be nice to close up the barn during bad storms.  Except for Jazzy’s, each stall has an inside door and an outside door/window combo. The roof is metal and boy does it make a racket during rain storms. The horse stalls are 12×12 with a dirt floor.

We love our barn but have some ideas for improvement and we’ll be writing about these as we accomplish them. This list isn’t in order of importance:

  1. Paved center aisle
  2. Outside lean-to for covered feeding
  3. Hay loft over the storage stall (done! I’ll write about this soon)
  4. Barn doors – each end. Either sliding or hinged
  5. Water piping with quick disconnect
  6. Horse shower capability
  7. Stall flooring with drainage
  8. Reinforced security door for tack room
  9. Covered front “porch”
  10. Paved parking area
  11. Camera security system with remote monitoring
  12. Rainwater collection system
  13. Aerated composting system
  14. Hay elevator for lofts (not as expensive as it sounds)
  15. Slide pole for exiting lofts 🙂
  16. Lights over every stall
  17. Barn speakers/radio
  18. Pneumatic pipes with quick-connects (for filling tires and running air tools)
  19. Fans

Some of those are clearly luxury items, such as the paved center aisle and barn speakers but if you spend a lot of time in a barn, why not make it more enjoyable and easier to clean?

We’ve put most of these projects off all these years but we’re finally starting to catch up on projects. More later.

What’s on your list of horse-related projects this year?

2 thoughts on “About Our Barn

  1. Hi
    I discovered tour blog in the list of the 25 best horse blogs. I think your blog i marvellous and very interesting to read. I started to ride again a year ago, after 25 years (I used to ride pony as a child), when my daughter had been riding for a year. I am riding icelandic horses since I like that they are so calm and not so tall. We have now started to dream of our own horses so it is very interesting to read about your experiences.
    Best regards Marie Jakobi (in Sweden)

  2. good for you (not to brag at all) but I’ve been ridding my whole life and I LOVE it!! its so calming (if you like horses or its just scary) and I feel free when I do and I too LOVE the blog it has taught me SOO much so I started horse blogs of my own called epic horse talk and equinegirlintexas.blogspot.com.

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