Autumnal Completion: Week 4:

Our barn is old. Decrepit. Could be a charmer, but it's not. Merely functional, and HUGE. Well, there is one part of it that I think is a charmer: mortis & tenon joints:

That's a lot of handiwork one doesn't find in modern Morton buildings and the like. It's amazing that this old barn has withstood winds and storms and such, just being pinned together with wooden pegs. Very nice construction from the days of yore.

But I digress.

Our barn has two stalls. We came to this property when it had 4 stalls, and we had 4 horses, and things worked out pretty nicely. Each stall had two doors, one leading out to the pasture or yard, and one leading into the barn aisle. After our herd went from four horses to two, we took out the center dividers and gave our horses new, expanded digs. A Taj Mahal of spacious shavings in which to roll.

Today's Completion Project was to replace the stall latches leading out to the pasture. One of our horses, Turbo, is particularly hard on hardware, likes to lean on, push on, sleep on things. I think we have incurred more stall damage since Turbo came to town than with any other horse. (He's not mean or crazy, just very large and heavy.) Push came to shove literally this summer, when we could no longer lock or unlock the stall doors.

So today I hauled out the hammer and drill and screws and pencil and hay and set to work. (The hay was to keep Mr. Socks, Equine Inquisitive, occupied with something other than my toolbox, which he dumped over twice while snooping.)

No pictures of this task, because A) I was so irritated by having to do one stall door three times to get it right (the other stall door took all of five minutes!!) and B) If we are to have rural Trick-or-Treaters tonight, then I should probably go find my traditional autumnal leaf-shaped wooden Halloween bowl and fill it with candy; the sun is setting...