Author: Ashton

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Epic Barn Project Ranch Summer

The Epic Barn Project Begins

We love our Montana neighbors. I (Ashton) have always longed for great neighbors, as growing up in a good part of the city led us to having lots of friends within a few blocks. Most recently, after I graduated in LA, and the first few years in Montana, the neighborly friends decreased in numbers at an alarming rate as friends went off to college and other adventures in LA and not knowing any people in Montana who had anything better to do than “hang out at the bar”…

When we moved out to our ranch where we really could only see four neighbors from our property, we were very fortunate that they were great neighbors.

With that said, one of our coolest neighbors, Buzz, has a 38’x32′ horse barn that came with their house that they don’t really use. Anna and her mother now have more than 10 horses so to make a long story short, we are going to be buying his barn and moving it to our property! Since I already have a post about helping out on Buzz’s Latest Barn, I’m going to call this the “Epic Barn Project.”

Epic Barn Project Begins!

Here are some pictures of the Epic Barn as it looked this morning. You can consider these “Before” pictures.

Epic Barn Project Before

Epic Barn Project Before

Epic Barn Project: Remove Roof

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Animals Chickens Ranch

Moving the Chicken Coop

Spring cleaning has officially begun out here. We’ve done a lot of work reorganizing our hay shed. One of the biggest challenges so far was moving the chicken coop.

Last Summer, I built our Chicken Coop of the Ages, and created a “run” for the chickens to run around in:

Chicken Coop
Chicken Run
This has been in the front of our Hay Shed for the last year, and the chickens are making a mess. It’s also taking up extra space where we would like to put hay, so we have decided to move it to the back of the hay shed:
Chicken Run

First we had to clean it up:
Chicken Run Before

Then we built a roof out of wooden planks and a lot of chicken wire. We had to sew lengths of chicken wire together to make a “roof.” We used rocks to hold down the chicken wire where it met the ground (on the left):

Chicken Run After

Then I cut a hole in the wall at the back of the hay shed, and we moved our (extremely heavy) Chicken Coop of the Ages to the back of the hay shed.

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Grub Club Montana Summer

Grub Club Ventures Outside

(FYI, Grub Club is our Thursday gathering of friends. If you’re ever in MT, swing by.)

We finally had fairly decent weather for our grub club, so we decided to build a campfire. For the first grub club campfire of last year we burned a dog house, so we had to come up with something fun and cool that we could do/burn…

Ashton and Anna's Grub Club Photos

Are those Pizza Hut boxes?

Ashton and Anna's Grub Club Photos

That’s right. We made a Pizza Hut Fort! Donald came up with the structure idea: using card stacking methods to build the different layers.

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Snow Trips & Activities

ATV and Ice

A cool thing about our property is that half of it is pretty steep 20+ degrees, and the other half is almost completely flat. This allows for lots of different activities. Well, that melt off that I mentioned in my last post drained down our steep hill and made a small pond in the middle of our “flat pasture.” And the latest cold snap has frozen the pond into a small ice pond.

If you’re interested in more back story: The previous owners lived in our current house for 1 year. The winter that they were here, the father had this great idea of dragging his children behind his vehichle on a tarp. I bet they had a blast, and it ended up killing a lot of the grass in a long strip. So now we have a fairly flat, slightly lower strip of land going through the middle of our pasture. It was this strip that now is home to our frozen puddle.

I think that’s enough details to enjoy our video. Donald and I (Ashton) took our friend’s ATV out into the pasture and had some fun:

Ashton:
Ashton on the ATV

Donald:
Ashton on the ATV

Here’s the video we made:


(If you don’t watch the entire video, watch Rosco (our dog) at 2:20.)

Wahoo! What a blast!
-Ashton

Categories
Horses Montana Ranch Snow Work

First Montana Thaw and Website Updates

After the horrible winter weather we had in December, January was pretty mild. We had a couple below zero weeks, but there wasn’t any snow or wind or anything else that would be considered “bad weather.”

I finally was getting used to all the snow. I was hoping to get 3-6 feet drifts, like we got last January… and it starts to thaw… Normally it doesn’t thaw until March or April, but our south-facing hill has been without snow for weeks already.

I saw the sun setting and decided to take a ride up our hill to see what kind of pictures I could get.

In this first one you can see the Mission Mountains and a series of sledding paths that we created in December and January. 😉

Ashton Anna Home and Montana Mountains

Here’s a shot of our house and Bo, the extremely “skiddish” Wild Mustang.

Ashton Anna Home and Montana Mountains

Here’s Jett (Carol’s other wild mustang) in his new head shot with a nice backdrop.

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