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Epic Barn Project Mocha

Barn Update: Trakehner Logo

Looking back, I realized I forgot to post when Grandpa Joe, Geo and Anna added the trim to the barn; or when Ross, Carol and Anna stained the entire barn; or when Carol and Anna painted the entire metal roofing green… So hopefully this post will cover all of that:

A couple weekends ago, we started a little project to add a Trakehner Logo to the barn gable. Here’s the progress:

First we had the Trakehner logo printed out on a 36″ tall sheet of paper. Using a razorblade, we cut the design into the wood. We made the cuts visible with a sharpie, and cut the logo out with a jigsaw.

Trakehner Logo in board

Then Anna painted it and I put it up on the barn:

Categories
Mocha Ranch Snow

Lake Anna

We had an interesting thing happen this year when the snow melted. Instead of making a cute little frozen pond for us to “ice skate” on, it just kept growing. It kept snowing, raining and freezing until we ended up with a lake that is currently covering about 7 acres (including the road between our house and the neighbors).

Here’s a video where Ashton investigates where all this water is coming from:

Categories
Epic Barn Project Ranch

Epic Barn v1.0 – Completed!

I really can’t believe it. Old man winter really gave us a break this year. It’s almost thanksgiving and we don’t have any snow on the ground. We got our first snow months ago, but it didn’t stick long enough to be annoying.

We have completed v1.0 of our Epic Barn! I’m calling it v1.0 because I’m sure we’ll be doing a lot of finishing work on it before it’s really done, but it is dry enough to put hay in!

Okay, here’s the pictures:

Here’s Donald doing his famous leg hold on the barn to get the hard to reach nails:
Epic Barn South wall

Here’s the south wall completed, which was pretty much done completely by Donald as I was called off to do a bunch of electrical work…
Epic Barn South wall

Honestly, this would not have been done before winter if it weren’t for the Stanfield boys. Donald and Casey did so much on the walls, it was ridiculous.
Donald and Casey

Nora and Liana have been testing out their new shelter and, so far, are really enjoying it.
Epic Barn

Finally, we completed the North wall!
Epic Barn North wall

And what’s a blog post without Mocha? (This first pic is my new dual-screen desktop image.)
Mocha on the Epic Barn Roof

Mocha has learned how to climb up and down ladders and scaffolding. If we leave a ladder leaned up against a pole, she’ll climb up and walk around on the rafters.  I still have no idea how she got up the scaffolding…

Mocha in the rafters

We have started filling up our new barn with hay for the horses. Here is what two tons of hay looks like in our epic barn:
hay Epic Barn
(You can see the horses on the far right of this pic. And since we were going to be stacking hay all the way up to the horses, we built a little wall to keep the nosy out of the hay stack.)

Here is 4 more tons of hay that has since been re-stacked in our barn and you can see the wall we built on the right side of the pic:
hay in the Epic Barn

Before I sign off, I’d like to make a thank you list of all the people who helped us build this epic barn:

Buzz and Connie
Donald
Grampa Joe
Buddy and Carol
Charlie
David
Marcy
Geoffrey
Casey
Clayton
Bryon
Johnny
Beau

THANK YOU!

Ashton and Anna

Categories
Animals Chickens Ducks Horses Mocha Ranch Rosco

A Winter Morning

We woke up this morning as we always do, and we went out to feed the animals. This time I brought a camera to take pictures of all of the ridiculous animals.

Because of the weather, we’ve been keeping the below three horses in the “large paddock.” Today, we let them out to run around in the field. They ran around for a good 10 minutes.
Ashton Anna's Horses

Ashton Anna's Horses
From left to right is Maple, Onora and Aspen.

While I was out in the pasture I took a picture of our house in the snow:
Ashton Anna's House

Categories
Animals Mocha

Mocha vs. Snake

Mocha’s first experience with a snake! (That we know about).

Mocha was playing around in the grass, and then comes out with a baby garter snake in her mouth.

She played around with it for a while, and she got bored of it.


We haven’t seen the snake since.

-Ashton