Barn Tour - Aisle C

And now we begin with a tour of my barn. I love my barn. It has lots of lovely amenities, friendly boarders and very little drama. There's 37 horses at our barn and the property is roughly 20 acres. All the horses seem happy at our barn.

There's a few entrances into the barn itself, six actually. The one closest to the main parking is my aisle way, named C. There's a people door and a garage door - and except in the cold, windy winter, the single car garage door is always open and this is the view a few feet in:

Aisle C, aka main entrance - Sam's stall is the open one, fourth one down

The aisle way is vacuumed everyday after dinner feeding. :)

The door on the left is a full service, girls only, bathroom. It has a toilet, shower, and sink. It also doubles as our kitchen and includes a coffee maker and microwave. On Saturdays you'll often find a box donuts on the counter in there. It's a long rectangular space with the toilet on the far end and the food stuff on the end by the door. We always talk about the sanitation of having food in there, but then we mumble about manure and look at our dirty nails and just say, oh well. :)

Just past the bathroom is a grooming rack (main rack 3). It's a really wide space with overhead lighting and a fan.

To the right just before the mailboxes on the wall is a door to the office which is quite a large space. It has 2 desks for the BO and BM and a separate tack room behind another door that can house at least a dozen saddles and does house BO & BM's tack and assorted barn paraphernalia.

Mailboxes are for payment to BO & trainers. We have an in-house dressage trainer who is also the BM. We have an eventer riding trainer who also has a beginner's lesson horse on site. And we have a 2x week drive in jump/longe/bareback trainer (my main trainer). There's several schedule boards for the trainers as well as the rotating farrier schedule that most of us use. The farrier comes every weds, you keep your horse on the schedule and he does your horse. You don't need to be there, a bill will appear at your stall. :)

Not pictured to the right and left of me taking that first photo is the first set of tack lockers (more about that further down) on the right and the first set of grooming racks on the left shown here:

Main grooming racks 1 & 2 - modeled by Sam

The racks have overhead lighting and fans. The rack shown at right houses a vacuum in the closed space and a hot/cold water hose in the back. Lots of hooks for bridles, halter and the like. Groom totes and blankets can go on the divider and saddle racks to hold your saddle. The mats are pressure washed on Sundays.

This is how it typically looks on a slightly busier day:

Main groom racks on a Sunday morning - Sam & my dog River

Saturdays are the busiest day at the barn.

Across from the groom racks is the first section of lockers. Every stall in the barn is paired to a locker which are approximately 3'x3'x6'. We are allowed to configure the insides any way we see fit. One lady had a HUGE chest of drawers that is on the back wall of her locker and she keeps all kinds of tack in the drawers.

Tack lockers for aisles C & A

Here's my locker that I configured myself. The shelf up top was the only thing I left in place from the prior owner. It was hard to get a good picture because I couldn't back up enough to get a good shot, so here's two shots:

Jump saddle goes in top saddle rack (I already moved it to groom rack). I use old fleece fitted saddle pads wrapped around the tubed rack to avoid indentations in the flocking. Seems to work perfectly. There's jackets, a show halter and pessoa rig/surcingle on left wall and bridles on the right wall. I use the shelf for clean pads (that's about 1/2, other half live at home) empty bags for blankets I have at the barn and some stable blankets/sheets/fleece - which I switch out seasonally.

I maximized space by using a 3 rack pad holder with moveable arms next to my saddles. It currently holds my bareback pad/cinch, fleece 1/2 pad and the current pad I used for the day. I also used both doors for whips, helmets, girths and 1/2 chaps. 

I have 2 sets of drawers (small one is under the blue basket) for strap goods, gloves, sunglasses (3 sets), standing wraps, spare stirrups, and misc items. The blue basket holds tack cleaning supplies, medication/pharmacy items and similar bottles of stuff.