A Few More Tack Room Finishes

 It's been a minute since I talked about the tack room.  Last fall, DH was working on getting the heat system installed in there.  I think that may have been the last tack room related post I made. 

I get frustrated with DH sometimes.  In the summer months, there are projects he will deem as "winter projects" because they can be done indoors and he doesn't want to 'waste' good weather outside by working on inside things.  But yet, in the winter, he often says it's 'too cold' to work on the in-the-barn indoor projects.  Such as doing finishing work in the tack room.

I posted back in early December that he had (finally) installed the heat system for the tack room and showed a picture of the wooden box he built to go around the heat exchanger.  It was all built from scrap lumber leftover from building and paneling the walls.  There were a few pieces I needed to stain, and he said once I did that he could get it all trimmed out and totally finished.  

At the same time he was building the heat box, he put up the cabinet I'd bought at Habitat Restore in the spring and also installed the countertop I picked up at a yard sale in May? June?  I don't actually remember the month.  Just that they'd both been waiting all summer and all fall for him to get the walls built/finished before they could be installed.  We used a scrap of quarter-round to trim the gap where the countertop met the wall.  It was my job to stain that quarter-round when I stained the heater box trim pieces.

Well, I stained all that in early January when we had temperatures in the upper 40s.  I told DH it was ready for him to install.

And I reminded him again in mid-January.

And again in late January.

At risk of being a nag, I pointed out to him in early February that those trim pieces were stained and ready for him.  And that once the trim pieces were put in place he could put his tools back in his shop rather than searching for them because they were still in the tack room.  (At the time he was looking for something that had been in the tack room for months because that's where he'd left it because he wasn't done yet. . . )

Well guess what!  It took all of five whole minutes to tack down those trim pieces on the heater box

and the quarter-round on the joint between countertop and wall.

Five minutes.  Two months of waiting, five minutes of labor.  (Imagine head bashing emoji inserted here)

For the most part, my tack room has been arranged how I want it to be and I've been happily using it the last several months.  It's not totally organized yet, one final project in there needs to get done before I have the space to put everything in its place, but overall it's working well.  I thought I would show off some pictures of my (mostly) finished and (sorta) organized tack room.

Reproduction print found at the local antique/artisan mall really makes it look ritzy.

A full-width view from the sink area.

Please excuse the clutter.

Full-width view looking at the sink area.

The one last project to be done in the tack room before it is really and truly complete is a wide shelf on two or (preferably) three walls at about 7' from the floor (remember, the ceiling is 10') for me to store totes of out of season or otherwise rarely used items.  Like winter blankets in the summer time.  And stall fans in the winter time.  In my mind, this past February was the perfect time to be working on that, because a) it's an indoor project and b) it was winter, when we do indoor projects. DH, however, felt more called to spending time in the house 'researching' things (like snowmobile trails, elk hunting trips out west, vacation destinations) on the laptop while sitting in his Lazy-boy than getting a shelf built so the tack room could forever be crossed off the to-do list. 

I'm picking my battles.  Although I can't resist saying "well, that's one of the things that needs to go on that shelf" whenever DH asks why this or that tote or fan or other rarely used item is sitting in the middle of the tack room floor or in an empty stall.  And now that we're otherwise ready for me to put out the word that we have an opening for a boarder, I can remind him that the last stall, the one that has been tool/material storage and all the totes that don't fit into the tack room yet, would be totally empty for a boarding horse to move in if he would build the shelf.