Barn Refresh

Almost a year ago I put our old horse, Guapo on a transport trailer to retire in Florida at Mrs's aunt's farm. I posted about it at the time. Here's the link. Unfortunately, after about 9 months of wonderful retirement, Guapo severely broke a leg and had to be put down in September. It was a tough time, especially for Mrs's aunt. We are forever grateful for her willingness to take him on and providing him with a wonderful, warm retirement.

Since he moved we have been picking away at transitioning the paddock back into an open area by removing the south side of the fencing, and we also fenced in most of the back yard so the dogs have a large area to run and explore.

In the last several weeks we have been focusing our efforts on refreshing the barn to make it a more usable space. We started with a face lift. It desperately needed a paint job. My work partner happened to have painted his garage recently and gave us the left over paint, and the use of his paint sprayer. This was great for the budget and a massive time saver.

We had already taken down, repaired and repainted the front door a wonderful candy apple red which stands out and is a nice blast of color, especially when viewed from the road. The above image is a before and after of the siding paint, prior to painting the trim. We were able to paint three sides of the barn with the leftover paint. We decided to save the back until another day, perhaps in the spring since we assumed the weather would be going bad soon.

I took this image today realizing I didn't have one yet of the front with the trim painted. It's rainy, wet and raw today, so it's not as bright and cheery as I'd like to portray. You get the idea. Much improved!

Mrs and I were able to find the paint that my partner had used at Home Depot, so we bought another gallon and over the weekend finished up the back of the barn. The above image shows the barn after I washed it and blasted as much of the old stain off as I could.

Mrs utilizing the paint sprayer. We had a good system down where I would mix the paint (it required a lot of watering down for the sprayer to function properly) and she would spray while I was mixing up the next container full.

All that's left on the exterior is trim paint on this side and working on plugging some leaks in the roof which I hope to get done before winter.

In between painting I have been working on the interior, organizing tools and purging old junk that needed to go to the dump.

We decided that perhaps the wood on the interior needed a coat of semi-transparent stain to brighten it up a bit. We had a gallon of stain in "Cape Cod Gray" in the basement, so we used that which did the long wall on the left. We purchased another gallon and finished the ends. We are not doing the stalls at this point, but may eventually.

 New shelving units I recently purchased. These will likely end up somewhere else in the barn. The work bench in the back was in the basement when I moved in in 1979. It needs some work to tighten it up and stabilize it, but it should function well for us.

 These shelves were also in the basement and were part of a another work bench. That narrow bench became the base for our small bar that we added to the kitchen counter years ago.
The black things were bridle hangers we bought years ago for the barn and were never installed. Rather than throw them out, I will be hanging extension cords from them.

The hand tools have a home now in one of the stalls. I'm sure I'll be tweaking the organization over time, but it's nice to have them more easily accessible.

So, we're getting there with this project. Today is not the most pleasant weather day, so I'm not doing much. Rest days before work are good, and it allows me to do things like this blog.