Our Good Friends: Tarps and Baling Twine

Just because the weather has been a tad uncooperative recently (rain, rain, rain – high winds – more rain) doesn't mean the To-Do list has shrunk. In fact, all that rain has revealed several leaks, all of which had to be fixed. Thank goodness for tarps and binder twine, two handy commodities of which we never seem to have too much.

Tack Room in the Unfinished Barn

Way back when Dad and I designed the barn, we decided on a 20X30' building with a tackroom, three stalls, each with a runout, and a wide covered alley-way so there would always be a dry place to tack up, trim feet, etc. There was nothing wrong with the design, but construction of the barn collided with some unfortunate life events (Dad breaking his hip, Mom falling critically ill) and the result was that Dad and I only finished half the barn. So we have a tack room, one stall, and a makeshift second stall where half the walkway should have been. This isn't actually a bad arrangement as we leave the stall doors open and just let the horses come and go. There's enough room to feed inside and they have access to a second shelter a little farther down the hill, but because the other half of the barn is missing, the roofline at what would have been the ridge running down the middle was never finished. Despite temporary patching, when it pours, water leaks in at the top, runs along the beams, and drips all over the tack room.

This week, wobbling on the tall ladder, fingers freezing as they clutched the chilly, wet aluminum rungs, we rigged up a huge tarp so the whole tack-room end of the barn is covered. Tied this way and that with binder twine, it looks like crazed spiders have been at work, but so far, things are much drier inside.

Tack Room in the New Old Trailer

We bought a bigger horse trailer this year, a used steel stock trailer from the interior of BC, which we've been tinkering with since its arrival at the farm earlier this summer. We installed a dividing wall forward of where the horses travel and have been keeping quite a bit of tack in there (due to leakage issues in the barn tackroom – see above). Alas, the gap just forward of the divider was big enough to allow the heavy rains to POUR into the tackroom, filling buckets and soaking everything in range. We fixed this issue by installing a clear plastic anti-rain panel in the gap, but we then discovered we had a slower leak, probably from the seam where the trailer roof meets the front wall (it's a bit hard to tell where the water is seeping in). More tarp and string to the rescue.

The trailer looks a bit silly with a bright blue 'cap' on the front, but things are much drier inside as a result. (I hasten to add that we don't leave the tarp on when we haul horses in the trailer!)

The Old Old Trailer

Before selling our old straight haul trailer, we wanted to re-paint it and reupholster the padded walls under the hay mangers (Ringo, in a fit of madness, or boredom, or petulance shredded them). This was a task we picked away at all summer until we had managed to paint ¾ of the trailer and take apart the padded walls. Then the rain started, leaving the back doors and one hay manger unfinished. Though I was able to take the wall panels up to the house and recover them (they look lovely now, I must say), there was no way to finish painting the back of the trailer until we built a temporary roof of – yes – tarp and binder twine. Actually, we had one of those handy dandy framing kits people use to build little shelters for lawn tractors and the like, so we whipped together a shorter (lengthwise) and taller (heightwise) version of the shelter frame, anchored it firmly to the trailer and several nearby trees and, voila, a primitive paint shop!

We now have no excuses (weather-related excuses, anyway) for not getting the painting finished and the old trailer sold.