by Nikki Alvin-Smith
Equestrians want more time riding and less time barn cleaning. While the meditational moments of mucking out a stall can be a peaceful interlude for some horse owners, others find the daily chores are time-consuming necessities that take valuable training time away from their precious hours at the barn. What to do? Here are some tidy-up tips the horse barn owner can employ to maximize efficiency and safety around the horse barn.
Build The Barn Right In The First Place
If you want a low-maintenance horse barn then careful consideration should be paid to types of materials and the quality of craftsmanship and design of the barn. Whether you are building a new horse barn or renovating an older building, the components utilized and their application will eliminate cost for labor and time spent on mundane maintenance needs like re-painting, fixing damage to hardware, doors, floors and walls. Buy the best quality you can afford, not the cheapest.
Seal all wood surfaces to protect them from manure stains and make deep-cleaning tasks easy to accomplish. Trim all exposed framing edges with stainless steel to eliminate horses chewing wood. Ensure that all walls are sturdy in their build, especially dividing stall walls and kickboarded areas. Choose substantial dimensional lumber sizes for walls and ensure they are sufficiently braced to withstand rubbing and impacts from kicking.
Design the barn with a view to making cleaning tasks straightforward. Some examples: Dutch doors on exterior stall walls can provide in/out access for equine residents and allow ease of clean-up by shutting animals outside during good weather; select window grills that can be dropped down to access window panes for cleaning.
Invest in a powerful vacuum with accessories that offer a good reach. While sweeping up with a broom is cheap, you are simply moving the dust and detritus around. Which is unhealthy for the respiratory well-being of you and your horses. Keeping floors clean will also minimize tracking of debris into tack rooms and feed rooms, saving the need for further cleaning.
Set Your Sights On Good Site Choice
When you park at the supermarket you generally try to park close to the entrance doors. This saves time and effort walking back and forth with bags of groceries. Think the same way when siting areas not just for parking, but for manure storage, hay and bedding supplies and distances to turn-out paddocks.
Consider the fire hazards and dust issues with siting combustible materials and supplies close to where the horses reside. Have you read these horsey housekeeping tips for best manure management practices? Proximity of manure storage to the barn needs to be evaluated for its ease of use in all seasons. In summer, the choice of too close a site to the horse housing structure will encourage flies and other unwanted visitors to breed and infiltrate the barn, but if the manure site is too far away from the barn in winter in areas where there is significant snowfall, then manure removal can become difficult to manage over many months of cold weather. Best option for manure storage may be a transitional area where it can be temporarily stored and regularly removed.
Clear The Decks
There is nothing more annoying than having to move items back and forth to clean. Keep blankets hung up and off the floor; place tack boxes in a designated space rather than in an aisleway; use collapsible saddle racks that mount on the wall; place ropes/halters on bridle hangers by stall doors; hang tools like muck forks on the wall; elevate the bottom shelving for grooming/bathing supplies to a 12” or more off the floor so you can easily clean beneath at every turn.
It is also a good idea to avoid creation of hard-to-reach corners in the building as these will inevitably become a haven for spiders, vermin, snakes and other unwanted visitors. Instead place larger objects or items along a wall, rather than tucked in a corner spot.
Ditch The Water Problem
Snow melt, adverse weather conditions like unusually heavy rainfall, can all cause unexpected problems with flooding that require massive efforts to clean up. Try to get ahead of the issue by keeping gutters and downspouts clear of debris all year around and have overflow ditches in areas that are likely to be prone to excessive water run-off.
While these ditches may remain dry for much of the time, their immediate availability when they are needed is a boon for preventative care of any structure and its foundations.
Keep The Barn Bird and Bug Free
Ensure that soffits are guarded from intrusion and nesting by birds with wire mesh if you want to avoid cleaning up bird droppings from water buckets, floors and walls. Bird infestations can also spread disease such as West Nile and Avian Flu, so keeping your barn free of birds is a good idea.
Make repairs to window screens and door screens before the insect season arrives, to minimize having to clean windows and surfaces of flyspecks and cobwebs. Seal small holes and refresh caulk around window sills to keep insect ingress to a minimum.
Tack/Grooming/Bathing Supplies
It is far less work to keep your tack and equipment clean if you wipe everything down after each use. Most horse folks will keep their saddle pads laundered and bits and girths wiped clean after each ride.
But in the case of grooming supplies like brushes, this is not quite as easy to accomplish. There are many products on the market designed for cleaning brushes without damaging them. And as good quality grooming brushes are expensive and often made of natural materials, it is well worth investing in them.
In our private yard we allocate one grooming kit per horse. This may be a luxury manner to use grooming supplies, but it allows specific types of brushes to be kept on hand for different horses. For example: sensitive horses may prefer a goat hair brush for face grooming or to finish a sleek summer coat, while horses turned out without clipping during winter months may require a durable mud brush. When you allocate each horse its own grooming kit you also minimize the chance of transmission of any contagious skin disease and horses that are by lifestyle muddier or messier do not transfer their dirt to your daily working performance horses.
At our barn we use sachets of dissolvable soap crystals that can readily mixed with water in a plastic washing-up bowl or sink to soak the bristles or hair of brushes without submersing the moisture-vulnerable wood or leather backing of the brushes in the water. These are anti-bacterial products that offer a thorough cleaning with a simple short soak. We then leave them to air-dry.
A Tidy Barn Is A Safe Barn
Even without a catastrophic event like evacuating horses from a barn in a fire event or a river breaching its banks and flooding a yard with torrents of water, the barn that is kept tidy will not only be more pleasurable to use, but it will also be safer. Fire safety measures and the ability to quickly batten down the hatches of a barn to keep animals safely confined to its interior are all good barn management practices.
You don’t have to be building a brand-new horse barn to incorporate safety factors into your day-to-day and seasonal barn care practices.
A tidy barn is not only more pleasurable to use, but it also offers a more professional impression to visitors. A cluttered environment can also add stress, so keeping things tidy can help you focus and feel more peaceful in your barn.
When complaining about the recurring routines that come as part of running a household to my mother, she gave me some good advice.
“Do one bit of extra housework every day. Even that small extra chore you do in addition to the necessary daily ones stops it building up into a massive task.”
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About Horizon Structures: One horse or twenty, there’s one thing all horse owners have in common…the need to provide safe and secure shelter for their equine partners. At Horizon Structures, we combine expert craftsmanship, top-of-the-line materials and smart “horse-friendly” design to create a full line of sheds and barns that any horse owner can feel confident is the right choice for their horses’ stabling needs.
All wood. Amish Made. Most of our buildings are shipped 100% pre-built and ready for same-day use. Larger barns are a modular construction and can be ready for your horses in less than a week. All our barn packages include everything you need –
Horizon Structures also sells chicken coops, equine hay feeders, greenhouses, dog kennels, 1 and 2 car garages, storage sheds and outdoor living structures and playsets.
Headquartered in South-Central Pennsylvania, Horizon Structures, LLC was founded by Dave Zook. Dave was raised in the Amish tradition and grew up working in the family-owned shed business. He started Horizon Structures in 2001 in response to an ever-increasing customer demand for high quality, affordable horse barns.
For additional information about the company or their product line, please visit their website at https://www.horizonstructures.com
About Nikki Alvin-Smith:
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