November Hill farm journal, 145

 It’s a new year and projects abound. We’re about 2/3 done with the laundry room updating. So far the final wall painting was done, new sink and pipes installed, new washer/dryer in and working well, and now we’re moving on with the wood paneled ceiling, which will be painted the muted white it is now. We had intended to have beadboard installed but it turned out doing the pine individually was not much more money and it will be more beautiful, so that’s on the docket. Our contractor is also making a stained pine “counter top” for the washer and dryer, and open shelving for the wall above them to match. I bought a lovely piece of hand-made tile for the backsplash of the sink, and some additional matching subway tiles that I think will make an attractive backsplash on the side. Until everything else is done, I’m holding off on putting that up, but in the end I think it will be very appealing. 

We’re ordering a Dutch door with arched window to replace the original and not very attractive one we’ve lived with all these years. I don’t know how long that’s going to take to arrive, but we can wait. 

As often happens, here in the midst of finishing up this project, another project that was next on the list suddenly shoved up to the top. The bottom of the barn on the pony and donkeys’ side has had some issues that have gradually worsened. The barn is built on a slope, so the side closest to the house is built up higher than the other side in order to be level. The feed room, hay stall, and pony/donkey stall thus have a much deeper layer of earth that was kept in place with long oak boards nailed horizontally to the barn structure. 

Over time the earth has pushed the boards out, bowing them in the middle, and we have always wanted to correct this but it was never the highest priority since until this weekend it was more cosmetic than anything. However, on Friday the board along the outside of the pony/donkey stall completely pushed out of the beams it was nailed into. Our contractor and I came up with a plan to dig out the “footing” along the back wall, install a two-tiered row of cinder blocks, fill them with gravel and screenings, and then rebuild the footing inside each stall along the back edge. Then he’ll put oak boards in place, using shorter boards so they will be secured with less distance between, and hopefully more stable and secure that way. 

So now, this has bumped the laundry room work. It’s not a big deal, other than just wanting to get something completed before moving on to the next, and anything related to horses and pony and donkeys and safety/comfort trumps anything else, so this is being taken care of this week.

The good news is that once this barn repair is done, and the laundry room complete, we can easily move to the next piece of the barn plan, which is finishing off the feed room so it has an actual floor, real interior walls, and is closed off up at the top so I can have some chance of a dust-free environment for feed supplies and tack. And we are figuring out how to drain a sink and have hot water out there. 

From there we’ll work on stall door and window repairs. Keil and Cody have really made a mess of one stall door and its latch, after learning they could quite literally throw their weight around. They just lean into it and manage to open it, usually during the night when they’re up at the barn on their side, but sometimes in protest during rainy days. Right now it is tied closed with many pieces of hay twine. 

The final project is getting the holly trees installed. This has proved to be a little trickier than it initially seemed, as the landscaper located 11-foot trees and because the root balls weigh 950 lbs. each, it will take a bobcat to move them from the gravel lane to the planting sites. It can only be done when the ground is dry, and they’re going to have to lay down a path of straw and do a few other things to avoid damaging the pasture. At some point in this process we opted to go ahead and order additional hollies to go along the fence on the same side of the back pasture, but because all of this will be, shall we say, activating for this herd, I determined we need to do the front trees and the back trees on different days a week or so apart. 

In the end we’ve compromised on the height of the back trees - 7-8 foot hollies can be moved with the dingo, with less noise and impact on the earth, so we’ll do those the week later. With Keil and his residual EPM stuff I’m unwilling to try to move horses from back pasture to front the day all the front work gets done, and I’m not willing to close them into stalls when the dingo is going to have to go right through the barn aisle to get to the back. 

We’ve worked it out now, and the trees will be on their journey to us on what will have to be a dry day. Thankfully the landscaper handles everything and I can just do the fretting I would do regardless. 

I think in the end they will be quite lovely. We’ll get the desired screening, the bees will get forage, the birds will get shelter and food, and the horses I hope will enjoy having some privacy from the neighbors and their activities. Once the hollies settle in I’ll start limbing them up for a more elegant look. 

These are the actual hollies (the taller ones):

And although a different species in this photo, you can get the idea of what the limbing up will do to the look of the trees as they mature:

We’ll lose a few feet of pasture but the horses aren’t usually on that narrower side of the property in front, and in back there’s more room. It will be nice to ride in the arena with a natural screening of trees to look rather than the back sides of the neighbors’ sheds. 

By the time these projects get done we’ll be into early spring and it will be to start clearing winter beds to make way for the spring growth to come in. I look forward to seeing how the fall plantings do come springtime!