Share Your Barn Blog Hop!!

It's blog hop time! Since most of us are just passing time until it's riding weather again, we might as well look at what range of facilities and horse keeping styles are available across the country. I find the different barns and set ups fascinating, so I hope you're willing to share. Here goes!

As per the usual, one picture really isn't enough for me, so I included several.

1) A view of the barn

I had to take this yesterday. I guess I'd never taken a real barn shot before. The main barn has five stalls, plus indoor crossties, a fancy ass tack room, and an upstairs storage area that is very useful for taking big pictures of the arena. (It's come up).

Under the overhang, we have the feed/spare blankets/additional storage area. It's completely out of reach of horses, so we don't have any unfortunate accidents involving grain. There's also a shedrow with a few more stalls and several dry lots with shelters.

2) Your horse's living space:

I love this about our barn. Courage has a 14x14 fully enclosed and insulated stall with a window into the main aisle (for feeding cookies) and a barred window (no glass) between him and the next stall so he can see other horses. 

It has an attached 12x24 run that is completely covered and bedded. As the picture shows, the panels can't be kicked through on the bottom and then block the wind in winter. Oh, AND the runs have a mister system installed for cooling in the summer time. 

Picture from this summer

PLUS

All the horse get turned out 6-8 hours a day, depending on weather. Right now, that's not terribly exciting due to excessive amounts of snow and ice, but in the summer, there are acres of maintained, irrigated grass that is neither muddy nor dusty. 

For this part of the world, that is heaven. 

3) In the tack room

Not my bridles, believe it or not

I love this. 

Super pretty cedar paneled tack room with custom painted bridle hangers. I also have a pretty sweet tack locker that I neglected to get a picture of. 

It's heated. 

There is also a tack hook for cleaning that's set up on a pulley system so we can lower it to use it and then retract it so it's not in the way.

Coolest thing ever.

4) Where you ride:

Misery

Yeah. We don't have an indoor. 

In the non-icy months (eg everything except December and January), it's a lovely sand ring with sprinklers that gets worked pretty much every day and watered as needed. 

5) My favorite feature:

C-rage inspects a sand pile from a now-complete project

Quite honestly, it's the barn owners. They give personalized attention to every horse. They constantly do maintenance and projects to keep the place going and even just to make life easier or nicer. They are always going above and beyond and are some of the nicest people I am fortunate enough to know. 

They even help out with my projects--when Redheadlins and I decided to enter the success Equestrian contest, they were in on the action. They gave suggestions, took pictures, and even told all their friends to vote for us. 

Taken by the BO

It's blog hop time!! Ashley at The Process of Learning wanted to do a "show us your barn" series to give us something to think about other than winter. Thanks Ashley!!