Category: Building Projects

First Two Weeks

Eye Infection and Poop

We’ve had Juniper and Leeloo home for a little over two weeks now and it’s been, okay. So far most of my time has been taken up with poop. I am still obsessively cleaning out almost all poop from the whole track almost every day. This will not last. If nothing else the freezing temperatures will eventually force a stop. But I am trying to stay ahead of the parasites so we’re doing both Ivermectin Gold and Strongid but I am waiting a few weeks in-between them and while we wait I will stay obsessive about picking up poop.

For those of you not familiar horses eat off the ground so they can pick up parasites. There are various treatments for them, but the industry has not been able to create/find a new one in decades and the parasites are starting to show resistance to the medications that we do have, so the shift has been to minimizing parasite load in the first place through improved management. Which mostly boils down to: pick up the poop. Long term I am planning on getting a harrow I can drag behind my lawn mower and I’ll use that for the poop in the majority of the track and just pick up the stuff around their main hangout areas like the shelters, water, and hay boxes.

Speaking of hay boxes – I finally finished the lid!! AND! We built a second one (that still needs a lid).  Big thank you to my friend for helping me figure out a design for the frame of the lid. Still need to figure out a mechanism for keeping it on the box, but right now Juniper has a grazing muzzle on and we’re still feeding the “roughage” hay so there isn’t danger of overeating so I’m keeping the nets off. This however has made me realize that a hinged lid might not be the best option and something that comes all the way on or off, but the horses can’t get off, will probably work better. Still haven’t worked that out yet.

What I did not realize was that Leeloo and Juniper would be afraid of the hay boxes. Leeloo in particular truly confuses me about what she does and does not find scary.

Example – several years ago at our previous barn they were doing construction and after the work day would sometimes store equipment in the arena. I was out with Leeloo and since we were alone I let her loose to roll (rolling in relatively clean sand is always preferred to rolling in mud). I turn my back for three seconds to set down her lead rope only to find that she has decided the skid steer with the two giant skids sticking out the front looks like the best toy ever. She has walked right up to it, between the two skids, and is in the act of reaching in to pull on the levers. Leeloo has tried to put almost everything she has ever come across in her mouth: the vet’s clipboard, the chiropractor’s iPad, sweatshirt strings, every whip ever, pitchfork handles, broom handles, literally any handle, glasses, Nate’s beard, cat food, hoses, the list goes on forever. Anyway, here is my horse, standing between the skids of the skid steer, reaching in to pull on the handles that make it go. Great. I managed to get around her so I’m facing her and signal her to back up and luckily she does. She clears both skids before she notices the next thing the work crew left behind. The single most terrifying thing in the world. A large wooden spool. About three feet across and about a foot and a half high. Probably used for a large hose or tubing, but currently empty and just sitting there. Leeloo comes to a dead stop, flags her tail, arches her neck, and goes into her snorting impression of an Arabian horse. The thing that could actually cause her harm – great toy. The thing that could cause her no harm in any conceivable way – terrifying monster. I do not understand my horse.

The haybox apparently counted as a terrifying monster. Not having expected that, I hadn’t made any effort to introduce her to it. Nate and I just put it out in the field while Leeloo and Juniper had been hiding from the bugs in the shelter and they hadn’t noticed. Now Leeloo had come up for water by herself and must have spotted it. I missed her very first reaction but I caught it out of the corner of my eye. When your normally pretty mellow horse decides to prance around snorting with her tail flagged and her neck all arched you notice. By the time I found my phone she had managed to calm herself down a lot and worked up the courage to investigate closer. You’ll notice she chickened out on her first attempt to walk by it calmly and ended up running past it, but then when it didn’t chase her she came back around for another try and this time did actually get to it and take a few bites of hay before deciding she had had enough of bravery for the time being.

The other thing that has been taking up most of our horse related time is Juniper’s eye infection. We knew she had one when we got her, but it just wasn’t getting better so I had the vet out the Monday after we brought her home and then we had a recheck last week. The conclusion is that she has formed an abscess over the top of the original injury and eye abscesses are usually fungal or mixed infections so we need to change up our treatment plan. Here is what I got from the vet:

Diagnosis: Corneal stromal abscess. 

Treatment: Since the literature and the ophthalmologist describe these as being commonly fungal or mixed infections, the approach would be to treat for fungus and bacteria, while trying to get the eye comfortable and stop the reflex uvieitis. The recommended treatment duration is 6-8 weeks.

6-8 weeks of giving eye meds 4-6 times a day – fun times.

I will admit that when I was imagining what it would be like to have my horse at home I hadn’t been thinking of poop and medicating eyes. But I know long term the good will outweigh the not so good. Even now, with most of the time spent doing the less than fun chores, it is really nice having them home. When Juniper nickers at me for her breakfast, or Leeloo comes up to see what I’m doing – which is usually picking up poop at which point Leeloo will sniff the poop and then immediately poop right by the poop cart (thanks), or when Leeloo calls to me when I am in the garage working and trying to have a conversation with someone else (seriously Leeloo, not everything is about you) they are a lot of fun to have around.

Fence – Part 2 of ??

There is a general outline that appears to be true about installing any type of tension-based fence.

  1. Decide where the fence is going to go, in particular the location of all the corner, end-posts, and gates.
  2. Install the corners, end-posts, and gate posts.
  3. Put up a line or two of your fencing material and put a minimum amount of tension in it.
  4. Use your line of fencing material to determine where the in-line posts need to go and put them in.
  5. Put up the rest of the fencing material and tension it.
  6. Electrify it.

We finished step one and now need to do step two – install the corners, end-posts, and gate posts.

The directions that came with the fence system remind me of the directions that are in some of the not-so-great textbooks I’ve had to teach out of. They are written by people who know exactly what they are doing to other people who already know exactly what they are doing. They leave the details out, use technical vocabulary that is not defined, have limited visuals, and are super dense. I read and reread and reread the directions referencing and re-referencing the two diagrams they had and still felt like I had no clue how to do this, so I went searching for a video online. There has to be a video online somewhere– right?!  Apparently the answer is: sort-of.

There are a few other companies around the country that sell the Geotek Common Sense Fence and Mule System and one of them is Cashmans in Ohio. Before we purchased the fence I did search around to see if I could get a better price and though some of these places were cheaper, they were all farther away and because these components require freight shipping the additional shipping costs always offset any potential savings. If you are near Ohio Cashmans may be a good choice for you, but they were not for us. I say this because the ONLY video I could find about installing our fence system was part of a longer YouTube video Cashmans’s put out that contains what appears to be various parts of some 1990’s era, VHS quality, video.

I watched the whole video (which was over an hour) and then made Nate re-watch the pertinent parts with me before we went out to install our first corner. The video makes it appear VERY easy.

 

LIES! Or perhaps more accurately these are condition dependent truths and we do not have the required conditions and they skip over ALL the details.

Places where the video did not match our reality or left out some major details:

  • The four-handled hand-tool they use to install the augers that we received was not welded correctly so we could not get the fourth handle in it and were working with a three-handled hand-tool which meant instead of handing it off to each other we each had to take a side and spin around in a circle. If you are picturing something like the dizzy bat game you are not far off. We were a bit more graceful, but not by much.
  • They were clearly working in loamy soil and not the heavy clay we’re dealing with. Getting each of those augers in took forever and we often had to make use of the tip from the shelter anchors and water the hole, which of course meant delays as we let the water soak in.
  • If you want your post to be straight then the anchor needs to go in straight which is easier said than done when two people with different strength stats are trying to screw it in.
  • The diagonal brace needs to line up in just the right spot on the vertical post, which they don’t mention at all. That turned out to be one of our biggest challenges and led to one of our bigger arguments throughout this process. We were trying to get the angle right and we would get it in, put the diagonal brace on, and be way too high or way too low. Then we’d take it off, unscrew the auger, re-screw the auger and invariably over-correct. After what felt like the five millionth time of overcorrecting Nate was getting pretty frustrated and angry and in an effort to help I said “because the brace is so long a small change in angle at this end results in a large change at the other end” in what I felt was a calm and reasonable tone of voice – though apparently calm came off as condescending and Nate thought I was calling him an idiot. We got over that eventually and now “a small change on this end will result in a large change on the other end” is a recurring joke whenever the process gets frustrating and one of us is getting mad.
  • Securing the diagonal brace to the vertical brace is MUCH harder than they show. Even once you have the diagonal brace in the right spot the company either changed the brace clamps or switched to shorter bolts because we could not get the bolt through the brace clamp enough to fit the washer and the nut on without having to clamp the brace itself. Of course our vice grip was too wide and trying to fit it on the brace and leave room for the washer and space to turn the nut was an extreme challenge. There was a LOT of swearing for that very first corner and then another trip to LeVahn Brothers hardware (I truly love them!) to get a needle nose vice grip which worked much better.
  • Needing to have the vertical post level-ish, at the right height, and with the pre-drilled holes aimed the correct direction was also not mentioned at all and was also a challenge. Particularly because for almost every corner post the holes were not drilled in straight through the post but slightly off to one side or in some cases not straight down the length of the post. It wasn’t till an argument at the second corner that we realized this. Nate was on one side insisting it was aimed correctly and I was on the other side insisting he had lost his mind because they were not even remotely aimed correctly only to realize we were both correct because the holes don’t go through straight.
  • The video shows them doing the four-foot corners which don’t require a horizontal brace but the five-foot corners we have require a horizontal brace. Getting that to line up correctly with everything is also a challenge.
  • The insulators do not go in that easy! It probably has to do with the holes not being drilled straight through the posts so the angles are off just enough to make the bolts catch. In one case it took me over 45 minutes to put in a single insulator! 

But other than that – simple and easy. And they really aren’t going anywhere. It took us an entire day just to get that first corner in, after which Nate declared we’re just buying new fence once we get the barn built and we’re never moving this one.

 

Now we just need to do 18 more!

Give me Shelter – Part 1

Waiting for the fence materials to arrive we turned our attention to shelters, plural. My long-term plan is to have three shelters. It is very windy where we live and we don’t have just one prevailing direction. Winter tends to be more west, north-west and summer south, south-east – but some of the worst storms in both seasons switch – it is very annoying and makes it hard to place one shelter that would be able to safely harbor my horses all year round. Leeloo also hates bugs almost as much as I do but will not keep fly related “clothing” on. Flymasks are rubbed off within hours. Fly boots are actively ripped off with her teeth the moment I take her halter off. I have this long-term idea of creating a summer “bug” shelter that would have solar powered fans running and shade – it’s not a fully formed idea yet – but what this means is ultimately I want three shelters. I also want to plan for some additional animals as this hobby farm grows so I wanted the biggest shelters I could get so they can handle additional animals when they come – no reason to buy something twice!

Bringing Leeloo home before a barn is built also leads to some other major logistical issues that need to be addressed. Where are we storing hay for the winter? Where are we going to have vet appointments and farrier appointments in the winter? Where am I going to actually be able to bring my horse in to work with? One of the paddock paradise principals is that the paddock is the horse’s home and personal space so you shouldn’t do stuff with them in it. Also, I hate weather of all kinds and want a place to get out of it to do stuff with my horse whenever possible. I put all of this together with my long-term goal of having three shelters to come up with the following plan. One shelter would be used as its name implies and would be the shelter for the animals. We’d place it in consideration of the strongest winter winds since those are the biggest deal. The other two shelters would be outside of the paddock and would face each other with a space in-between. One of them would be used to store hay – because hay cannot sit outside in the elements – and the other would be my makeshift “barn” with a stall of sorts on either side where I could bring a horse in to feed or doctor or trim or groom and the middle would be an “aisle-way” of sorts and storage. This meant I was looking at getting the three largest shelters I could. BUT – because this is all temporary until we get an actual barn built and a permanent paddock track created and because I didn’t want to deal with the city and building permits – these shelters need to be temporary and moveable, no permanent structures allowed.

Some credit for all this craziness of getting Leeloo home before there is a barn belongs to a non-horse-having friend who asked me last summer why I didn’t just bring Leeloo home. I listed the many barriers to that happening – fence, shelter, water, hay storage, poop management, place to do stuff with her in winter, etc. Having a horse at home is far more work and far more complicated than having a cat or a dog. But that conversation planted a seed that unbeknownst to me was germinating all that time so when my farrier said this spring “She’s never going to be sound in this environment.” that seed sprouted into this current madness. That same friend is also one of the most confident, go-for it, we-can-do-it, optimistic people I know. Which is good for me because I am only confident with things I have a lot of experience with and I tend to view the world from a pessimistic (realistic?) lens. When I told this friend that her crazy and totally impractical suggestion from last summer apparently germinated into this thing actually happening, but that I was still concerned about the cost of everything including how expensive a three-sided shelter was, she very confidently declared that together she and I could build the shelters I needed by ourselves for less money and in a reasonable time frame.

Some key background information: Neither of us are accomplished woodworkers, we are novices at best. Nate and I did take a community woodworking class several years ago and built two Adirondack chairs and a bench. The bench has a persistent wobble that we haven’t been able to fix and one of the Adirondack chairs had a loose seat slat issue from the very beginning, but we didn’t realize it until we were moving it out of the classroom to get it home and at that point were both too embarrassed to bring it back inside to fix it (this is why it’s good for me to have a confident friend). My friend has slightly more experience than that, but still definitely in novice territory. We also both have full time jobs and she has kids – and she tried really hard to talk me into building these shelters ourselves and was confident we could get them done in the same time-frame the professional companies I was looking at could get them done. She almost managed to convince me. Almost.

I talked her down to building one shelter, the one that would be used for hay for now and would long term be my crazy “summer bug” shelter, since potentially wrecking a perfectly fine and expensive shelter on a half-baked idea doesn’t make much sense, but wrecking a shelter made by two novices that probably isn’t going to be so great to begin with seems far more reasonable. I also have several other building projects in mind including hay boxes and some compost bays and said I would love her help with those projects. These conversations happened in April. In this case pessimistic caution turned out to be the right call because the shelters ordered from the company arrived weeks ago and to-date my friend and I have managed to build one, singular, hay box.

 

That still needs a lid.