Building also Brings Blog-less-ness

November and December were no doubt busy months with a trip to SD for Thanksgiving, a birthday celebration for Cody and hosting the family Christmas here at home, then a trip to Roseau for the Dunham side Christmas celebration! However, somewhere in all that free time...HA!...we also started some work in our barn.

For those of you who have been reading my blog site for a while you know we have been piecing together our barn little by little. We met our goal this last fall by installing indoor lighting just before the daylight savings change brought extra hours of darkness. We have been thankful for each little completed project and it has been fun to see the barn come together more and more.

Stalls and a tack room have been on our wish list for 'sometime in the future'. However, this fall we were gifted some money to get started immediately. So, off to Menards we went for a trailer load of lumber. My mother offered one full weekend of babysitting in December so we could have a marathon building weekend. Well, we needed to scramble before then to get the post holes dug before the ground froze and get some of the framing up, in order to make the most of our time on that weekend. As soon as Cody was tucked in for the night Grady and I would head out to the barn, baby monitor in hand, and build away!

Both of us enjoy working on building projects and enjoy working with each other. MOST of the time we are good partners and make a great team. We each have had different building experiences in the past so it has been fun to bring our ideas and knowledge together and watch the fruits of our labor as the stalls and tack room began to take shape. We were also trying to race the clock as certain things needed to get done before the weather got colder. We found ourselves up many a late nights, considering we usually didn't get started until 8:30 p.m. at the EARLIEST!

We managed to get all the preliminary work done that we needed to in order to benefit the most from our marathon weekend while my mother was babysitting. That weekend we had bitter cold winds so I was very THANKFUL for a closed barn AND my insulated Carhart bibs! After 2 full, long days of building we had Cody's birthday party that Sunday night! Whew what a whirlwind!!

Well, we have had to take a little break from our building project during the holiday festivities and the record COLD temperatures. Somehow, building in -35 below zero (that is not windchill!!) just doesn't sound all the fun! We have nearly completed the stalls, (they are usuable at this point) and gotten all the walls up for the tack room. Hopefully, now that we have a little warmer weather (yes even 10 degrees seems WARM..today is a tropical 20!) we can get back out there and finish off the tack room. It will be so nice to have our saddles in the barn instead of in the house, or garage, or whatever random place they end up. I'll post more pics when it is complete. In the meantime here's a little glimpse of our work:

Thanks a bunch for the gifts Mom and Dad (and Grandpa)!