Barn projects never end

Well it is officially March, well actually March 7th since I am never on top of things haha. My latest project has taken up a good chunk of my time. Since we will be getting chickens this year, for the first time!! I had them growing up but this will be the first time having them as an adult. Any who in order to be ready for them when they arrive I have been working on redoing a small section of the barn in order to incorporate a coop so to speak.

When we first bought the place the barn had six stalls, when our foal for this past year was do I took out the wall between two of the stalls to make an extra large stall for mom and baby. I also took out the stall next to the wash rack to use that area as hay storage. I find that remodeling the barn has become my favorite hobby as I have redone parts of it multiple times already. At this point I have two normal sized stalls on the Left and on the Right I have two extra large stalls. The third stall that was originally on the right has been incorporated into one of the others. I left a 4ft wide by 10ft long section of that third stall open as that will end up becoming the chicken coop. I just need to finish putting the walls up and then I am going to put tin on the inside so that it is easy to clean.

Since the stalls all had solid walls between them and I wanted to the horses to be able to see each other and also get more airflow in the stalls. I used the metal grates from one of the stall I had taken apart and put them between the two stalls on the left. Unfortunately I did not have any other metal grates for the left side. Not only are they hard to find used but also pretty expensive to buy them new. So instead I used 3/4 inch gray PVC pipe cut into sections as my grates between the stalls on the left and also for the stall that will be against the chicken coop.

I wish I had taken more photos of the process but I only took one of the final product. Basically I used the boards that had been the solid walls to create my top and bottom supports for the PVC. I then drilled (using a 1 1/8 spade bit) holes every 3.5 inches along both boards in which the PVC would slide into. The PVC were 10ft long so I cut those into 38.5 inch pieces to give me roughly 3 feet for the height of the PVC bars. It took 29 of the 38.5 inch pieces for each wall I did. The drilling and cutting were the easy part. The hard part was getting all 29 PVC pipes lined up with the holes in the top and bottom boards. I found that working from the center out worked the best since I was doing this on my own and did not have an extra set of hands. Once the PVC were set in the boards, I used a rubber mallet to hammer the top board down to make sure they were secured and then screwed them into the metal brackets on each end.

Finished Stall Grate

The only thing left to do is re-attach the water bucket holders and feed bins. Then on to building the chicken coop piece. I will try to take more photos of that process.