One of the things that has been driving me crazy about the barn at Caney Creek is the floor. Starting with the floors in the stalls, there was absolutely nothing flat. Each stall had Pea holes 3 foot deep that literally took hours to dig out all of the old shavings and the rest of the stall was like a roller coaster.

After digging the stall down to the dirt underneath we started to throw in fresh dirt. The goal here was to bring the entire floor back up to level with the sides of the stall walls so that we could put mats in.

With 40 stalls that all need to be fixed, this project will be ongoing for some time. At the time of this writing, 8 of the stalls are completed and we’re trying to find more rubber matting to do more. We’ve already gone through 1 large dump truckload of fill dirt and will need another before we can start more stalls.

To ensure we don’t run out of things to do around the farm, there is another thing driving me crazy about the barn. That is the floor itself between the stalls. Yep, it is a hilly mess as well. I assume it has happened with all the walking and then building up where the floor gets wet and the wind blows more dirt into the wet spots, but it was crazy. It didn’t make it any better that when the wind blows you get blasted with dirt.

This job was a bit much for us to do alone though so we hired some guys to come to fix it.

Next up they got 4 truckloads of crush and run to bring the floor back up to level but 3 inches below floor in order to lay 3″ pavers down. In addition they’re building a retaining wall along the border with the arena in order to make sure the dirt doesn’t end up pushing up the pavers on that side.

Once they finish the retaining wall and fill it with dirt, the next step is starting to lay the pavers.

The rain slowed things down a bit but we’re almost done with the new floor. Hopefully today the last bricks will get inserted into place and the next project will begin.