When the Walls, Come Tumblin' Down

As John Mellencamp would have put it, the walls came crumblin', crumblin' today.

Stephen and I went over this afternoon and started tearing [almost] everything out. To give you a general idea of what's going on, Sonny's "stall" is 15x16 in a corner of the barn. One of the interior walls of his stall adjoins another, smaller, stall. We are going to completely inclose the smaller one and make it a tack room so that I have a room right next to his stall. Perfect, eh? Well, the barn is ancient, so most of the wood on the stall was nasty and rotted. We could have dealt with that, but the issue was how they had put it up. Pardon my language, but most of the barn was just half-assed.  Therefore, in order to build a tack room where the walls weren't completely slanted and hanging by the hair on their chiny, chin, chin, most of it had to be taken down.

The first project was getting the wall that separates the stall and the tack room out. This wall was by far the worst; it was incredibly slanted and rigged up there.

If you look at the right side, you can see how slanted it is.

The first step was to take the plywood off so we wouldn't have to worry about that once it was on the ground. 

Once the plywood was off, the wood came off [fairly] easily. After that we took the wood off the outer wall in the tack room. 

Bye, bye wall!

You can see the that the whole wall needs pushed
back onto the cement blocks. 

We then moved on to the inner-most wall of the tack room. The wall itself wasn't awful, but we needed to take most of the wood off in order to slide it down so there wouldn't be huge gaps. 

Gaps at the top, solid at the bottom.

Almost there!

You can see we also took the half-door off the tack room. We will be replacing it with a sliding door. 

Three walls done, one to go! 

Our final project of the day was to take the wood off one last wall. Just like the inner-most wall, it was gapped at the top and solid at the bottom. Again, we took all the wood off that had gaps between boards.

Along with taking down all the wood, we went around and took nails out so we have a "clean surface". Now when we have time, we will be ready to start building the walls back up. Stay tuned!

To see more on Sonny's Sanctuary and the construction process, click here. 

Thanks so much to my boyfriend Stephen, for doing most of the work. Maybe in return, I can buy him a belt.