Sunday, December 9, 2012

Prep for Walk-In Cooler (part 1)

I should have been posting about this project for the last few weeks because now I'm so far behind on it I feel a little overwhelmed by it.  On a trip to Iowa a couple of months ago we decided to prioritize the farm needs for the next few years and the two projects at the top of the list were deer fence and cold storage.  After brainstorming the pros and cons of different cold storage options we decided to build a walk-in cooler that will be made cold using a CoolBot system.

For people who haven't been to our place, we live in a barn.  A large green metal building that we built about eight years ago.  We live upstairs and most of our four-legged family lives downstairs.  Over the course of eight years though our living needs have changed.  This summer one of our old horses passed which left us with two extra horse stalls downstairs that were doing nothing but accumulating stuff.  So a few weeks ago Robert decided to tear out those stalls in preparation for our walk-in cooler and more useful storage options.  I wish I had taken a picture before he started but by the time I got my camera out he had two walls torn down and things were underway.


Originally we thought we might work on both stalls separately to avoid having to move so much stuff around since one stall was full of our horse hay for the winter.  So we went ahead and had a truckload of limestone screenings brought in to raise the floor about a foot in preparation for concrete.



(This would now be known as Milan's Big Dirt Pile).  When Bruce came out to talk about pouring concrete though it soon became clear that the project would cost much less if we went ahead and filled in both stalls at once.  So out came the hay.  And since the other two horse stalls were where we put the "stuff" from the now empty stall, the hay ended up stacked everywhere.  With more stuff stacked on the hay. 


The combination of hay and the lumber (from the stall walls) stacked everywhere made it a little tight to use the tractor to haul screenings in from the Big Dirt Pile but we got it done.  



Pictures of more progress tomorrow!

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