Check, Check, and Check

Last weekend, we got a few major/minor tasks crossed off our to do list.  Major because they are important, minor because each of them was relatively small.  All of them needed to be done before winter weather hits.

 Cellar insulation

Last January, I noticed that in several places down in my cellar, the insulation was missing.  Or that rodents had chewed through it. Both of which were letting in a major amount of cold air.  Since my well tank and the water lines that go into the house are located in the cellar, all that cold air in January was a problem: my water line froze in one small spot.  And, because DH was out of town at the time, I 'fixed' the problem the way that was available to me at the time: I stuffed rags/old clothes into each spot that had an air leak.  

I was able to thaw the water line, and the rags stayed in place the rest of the winter.  Actually, until this past weekend.

DH used some pieces of that thick pink insulation board to make patches to cover up the leaky spots.  He also used a can of expandable foam insulation to seal things up where the pink board didn't fit.  Now there should be no frigid gusts of air to freeze the pipes in the cellar during the winter.

Feed room faucets insulation

A couple of times last winter (both in January if I remember right), the water faucets in my feed room froze.  Inside the tack room, the water for the sink still flowed just fine, so we figured the problem was in the wall where the water lines run from the tack room to the feed room.  DH thought he had put enough insulation in the stud cavity, but apparently not.  He'd used fiberglass batts, which were kind of hard to snug tightly around the pipes.

His plan, when the (supposedly frost free) faucets froze, was to wait until summer, and stick some expandable foam insulation in the wall specifically around the plumbing.  Summer came, and he forgot (his short term memory has become a worry of mine this year, but that's a topic for another post).  I reminded him in September, and after his memory had been refreshed, he said it was on his list to do yet this fall.

So I was really happy when, can of Great Stuff in hand, he announced he was going to add insulation to those faucets.  As you can tell from the photo below, there's a little bit that needs to trimmed off the wall on the tack room side.  Hopefully now we truly do have freeze proof water in the feed room!

Stall #1 floor

This stall has been a tool room/storage area ever since we got the mats laid two years ago.  While we were building the tack room--for about an entire year--we not only kept a table full of tools in here, but also many, many totes (awaiting those shelves to be built after the tack room itself was walled in) as well as the bales of pine shavings I use for bedding the stalls.

Being so long unoccupied by a living animal walking around on the mats, we had some opportunistic rodents tunnel their way in under the outside walls and move around the gravel under the mats to make themselves nice little runs and nesting sites.  And now that the tack room was (finally) finished and I no longer needed that stall for storage, having holes and tunnels under the mats was a problem.

We had some gravel leftover from making our gate pads this past spring, and I had earmarked it for fixing the stall floor.  I just needed DH to make himself available to help me remove the mats, shovel the gravel in the low spots, tamp it solid and level, then put the mats back in place.  He, of course, did not want to do this in the heat of summer, so it was very low priority on his personal to do list.

Well, the hot weather is long gone, and the little pile of gravel left in our parking area awaiting the floor repair needed to be out of there before the snow falls and the parking area needs to be plowed.  So, it made its way up to the top of DH's to do list (finally).

Removing the mats was no fun.  But the floor repair itself was pretty quick and easy.  And the mats were much easier to reinstall than they had been to install back in 2024!  I'm glad to have that done.  Now my priority is to get another boarder horse so that it can live in this stall, which should do the trick for deterring any new sub-mat excavating by rodents.