How Caring For Horses Prepared Me For Home Ownership

We basically played in the mud all weekend.

Last weekend while we were spending 3 days without electricity (Ask me how fun that was and how many hours it took me to get from my office to my house on Friday night! The answers are NOT AT ALL and EIGHT.) Michael and I decided to tackle some outdoor home projects. We needed to install a tree well in front of our crawlspace window as well as build two packed stone pads for the air conditioner unit and propane tanks that we're having installed.

As we were working, I realized that horsekeeping has prepared me for doing projects like these - and more - in ways I never expected.

Digging in the wet, heavy clay to make a space for the tree well and dig out a base for the pads was no problem, because I have 20 years of experience in shoveling poop and urine-soaked bedding. Wet clay? HA. That stuff had nothing on stripping out the straw-bedded stall of a mare with an over-active bladder.

I got this.

Shoveling load after load of crushed stone? Easy-peasy. Have you ever spent several hours smashing ice out of water buckets with an axe? Because I have.

Pushing the rickety, falling-apart wheelbarrow full of rocks was a walk in the park after years of experience shoving over-full wheelbarrows held together with baling twine through the most ridiculous mud and snow you've ever seen.

Ta daa!

Tying off string around stakes to mark out the size of the pads showed off my braiding skills, and I deftly tied surgeon's knots to keep things nice and taut.

Tamping down the rocks to make a solid base for the equipment was cake compared to getting dirt stall floors ready for rubber mats, which is, as we all know, one of the worst barn-maintenence jobs ever.

Driving our joke of a lawn tractor was still rather harrowing, though, since in all my years of caring for horses I never got very good at piloting piece-of-junk lawn equipment.

This is the point at which it ran out of gas...

All that said, if you have some outdoor home improvement projects to do, get yourself a horse girl!