Trade Zone - Stall Makeover

The time had finally come to do something about the horse stalls on our own farm. My contracting business includes building elaborate new horse barns for large Kentucky Thoroughbred operations, yet our own horse barn was a different matter. Ours is not a commercial venture with the obligatory show barns to impress clients. We simply wanted a safe, functional, and attractive facility to house our few sport horses. We have good pastures, so our horses are rarely in stalls more than a half-day at a time. When we purchased the farm 13 years ago, there was an old barn on the property that was reasonably sound after many years housing tobacco and providing basic shelter for cattle. We brought in water and electricity and used the 12-by-12-foot post layout to construct some short-term stalls for the horses that we were moving onto the property with us.

This tobacco barn had dozens of four-by-four-inch rails running horizontally at various heights that were used to hang the leaves for curing after harvest. Although they were solid rough-sawn lumber, we had to remove them to open up the stall areas for our use. It seemed a waste to dispose of them, so we stacked them horizontally to create four-foot-high stall walls, simply resting the bottom rail on the dirt floor. New rough-sawn oak two-by-10-inch plank formed the front and side walls. Although intended as a temporary solution until we had time to build a new barn, the stalls were solid and safe for the time being.

Fast forward to the present. As you have undoubtedly guessed, we never built a new barn. We learned, somewhat to our surprise, that old tobacco barns make wonderful structures for horses. They were built to shed rain, but provide plenty of ventilation—exactly what horses need. The barn was situated on top of a hill with good drainage. The gaps in the siding boards and tall ceilings allowed movement of large quantities of air without being drafty. Over the years, we fixed sagging beams and rotting post bottoms, installed a water line, and new electric service. We poured an exposed aggregate concrete aisleway and built a secure tack room. The “temporary” stalls, however, worked so well and were so solid that they never left, but they were starting to deteriorate. The dirt floors had large craters in the areas where occupants liked to leave liquid deposits. The horizontal rails were almost impossible to clean and the lower ones had begun to rot and invite termites to move in. The time had come for a stall makeover.

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