After the strenuous time so far, I decided today that I’d take things a little easier.

Abe went straight out at 7.30am when the dogs rousted me out of bed (there’s nothing quite like a pair of whippets walking off with your duvet to get you moving on a chilly morning!) The dogs had breakfast, I had breakfast, checked emails on the phone (note to self – must organise internet here….) and replied to one about George the Suffolk – the trainers want to keep him another week or two, is that okay? I said yes, provided he’s happy and learning things, though Abe would probably disagree with me! I miss his big beaming face in the mornings, but his education should probably take precedence over my feelings. Possibly even over Abe’s feelings!

After that Abe came in for a while and I took the dogs to my mother’s, dropped them off, went on up to the stables to do Poppy and Dancer (they consented to stand near the ramp this morning) and then back to Mum’s, where I did the ferrets and bunnies, then loaded the small trailer up with taller step ladder, wheelbarrow, weld mesh (for rat-proofing quail cages) and some canes.

Back to Cairnorchies, where I unloaded everything, turned Abe out and mucked out (one barrowload instead of several buckets to carry to the muck heap – good decision on the barrow!), discovered I’m still three feet short on getting into the loft to fix the water tank’s overflow, and then turned my attention to the fencing for the geese.

The chicken wire I found the other day is about 6 feet short of securing one end of the run.

The fence on the other end is, I think, long enough – but it’s not allowing me to remove it from the posts, the posts don’t want to come up and my pliers won’t cut it!

I’ll have another go at shifting the posts tomorrow, perhaps.

John and Lynne came by with a more powerful drill John had borrowed from a friend and the slip rails are now up in the barn (They also gave me some flowers, a welcome to your new home card and a beanie hat with a USB-rechargeable light in it!) I’ve left the bales where Abe can reach them, in case he wants to pull them around still, but he was thoughtfully chewing the rails when he came in tonight, the monkey! He was also militantly uninterested in his dinner – he looked at the bucket, took out the carrot and walked off crunching it in his teeth. I think he’s too full of grass to bother with chaff! That’s fine – I’ll just drop a carrot or two in a bucket for him instead.

I had another go at the toilet seat today, too – I tried with bare fingers but couldn’t unscrew the fixings, so then I tried a pair of piers. They wouldn’t grip it so I moved up to bigger pliers, today I tried an adjustable spanner. The plastic nuts are just disintegrating so I’ll pick up a hacksaw from Mum’s tomorrow and just saw the darn things off. The new seat has its own fixings included so no loss!

After all that, I headed back to Poppy and Dancer (foot of the ramp again, but Dancer almost touched it with a hoof at one point!) and then back to Mum’s for evening rabbit and ferret duties, followed by dinner and home with the dogs.

I’m typing this by candlelight, as the lounge bulb just blew – I must get spare bulbs laid in! I’m also almost out of firewood so tomorrow I need to saw up all the wood I’ve pulled out of blocked doorways so far and stack it handy for an armful or two each evening on the fire.

I still have the small trailer here – tomorrow I’ll load it up with all the rubbish I’ve dragged together and sacked up so far and have a tip trip. I want to pick up a metal blade for the jigsaw so I can cut perspex to replace the stable shed’s window, which is currently almost filled with (for unknown reasons!) a 40mph sign. I think I have enough perspex to make repairs to the workshop windows, too – that would be good, because I half-expect the panes to have fallen out every time the wind blows, possibly taking the frame with them!

 

Readers will probably remember this boarded-up door to the stable shed:

It meant Abe has had to wiggle his way out of a human-sized door to enter or exit the stables, which is possible for a flexible young Arab but would pose quite a challenge to a much bulkier and less lithe equine like George. Accordingly, I decided I’d remove the boards blocking up the doorway and reinstate a rolling door. I started this process by measuring the gap, which is eight feet, and also the two smaller internal rolling doors, which happen to be four feet each.

Knowing that Lynne and her builder boyfriend John were coming to visit this afternoon, I decided to push on with the job. I spent most of the morning knocking out the boards, most of which were rotten, together with the uprights and a board along the ground, all of which were rotten as well, then clearing the ground, which turned out to be weeds and trash on a reasonably good concrete apron.

John and I got the doors off their rollers and carried them over to the stable, where they went onto the rails easily. They’re a little short but fit nicely for width and they’ll do for now.

Abe spent much of the day observing my antics with interest from his paddock, but appears to approve the end result.

It gives a great deal more light inside the stable shed, of course, to have an eight foot hole in the wall rather than a pile of rotting boards!

At some point I’ll replace these doors with a permanent solution, but for now I’ll live with the multicoloured effect and Abe will be able to look out from his stable onto a view rather than the inside of a building.

At Denmore, I couldn’t get access to the horses until 9 am. Here, I was up at 7.30 and straight out with the dogs to check on Abe. He was – as usual – quite serene and self-possessed, though apparently he didn’t like the bale barricade I’d constructed, since some of the bales are sporting toothmarks!

By 8am he’d eaten as much of his breakfast as he wanted and I put him out in the paddock to graze for an hour. As Dawn Horses go, he poses rather well!

I brought him back in at 8.45 when I took the dogs off to visit Poppy and Dancer. I was planning on leading the horses across the road and back, but Dancer made it clear she has no intention of leaving the top yard. She was so adamant she even started rearing in the gateway, so I turned them back and we did ten minutes leading practice in the school instead. She had a couple of rears there, but settled after a few minutes to walking quietly and politely again, so I’ll work on reinforcing that for now.

I went from the stables to Mum’s place, where I did the ferrets and bunnies (Blue had at least 2 babies – we’ve seen a little black one looking very smug as it hops quietly out of sight!) and left the dogs for the day, returning to Cairnorchies with another car load of stuff for the house and beasties.

I’ve spent most of the day watching Abe grazing and working on picking up some of the junk and trash half-buried in the grass. One particularly well-overgrown wire-mesh gate took a lot of towing from the car to shift – in pieces, so there was a lot of back and forth and finding more places to reattach the tow rope! – but it gave up at last.

I put Abe away in the barn before I headed over to spend time with Poppy and Dancer – he can see and hear horses across the valley and I don’t want him getting ambitious about heading over to say hi!

Poppy and Dancer came in alright, with a little scampering because there’s a very young mini gypsy cob filly now in the field with them, and then consented, with some encouragement, to walk warily around the trailer, which I’ve parked back in the top yard where they have to pass it to go in or out to the field. That’ll do for now, so I put them away and fed them, heading onwards to do the bunnies and ferrets again, have dinner with my mother and head back with the dogs for the night!

The sooner Dancer can be convinced into the trailer, the better – I’m still commuting, and it’s even further now than before!

It was supposed to be all three…. if, as Meatloaf sang, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad, then I suppose 1 out of 3 ain’t good!

Poppy loaded beautifully in the morning, then stood and waited in the trailer for nearly an hour and a half as Carole, Lynne and I did everything we could to get Dancer to even set foot on the ramp. She was not having any of it! Rearing, kicking, pulling, we tried looping arms around her rump and wheelbarrowing her up the ramp (both Carole and I have sore backs today!), even blindfolding her.

Wasn’t happening!

To cap it off, when we decided to stop and let the mare and foal just rest and wait by the trailer while Lynne and Carole went to get on with their actual jobs, Ceilidh staged a sneaky duck out of the field and headed off across the garden. Poppy heard or saw her, I’m not sure which, and then I had her leaping around and whinnying for her herd-leader frantically, which set Dancer off again! I took them back up the road to their stable and shut them in for a while to calm down, then turned them out, which restored peace and calm to everyone’s lives.

I pitched in to help Carole and Lynne, having derailed their morning’s work so effectively, and once all the stables had been mucked out, hay nets stuffed, beds freshly laid and feeds mixed, I caught Abe and took him to the trailer.

He went straight in, Lynne popped the ramp up and I drove off without delay.

Abe travelled beautifully – cross-tied in the trailer, so he couldn’t turn around, this time! – and I unloaded him at Cairnorchies and popped him into the barn here fifteen minutes after leaving Denmore. He explored quietly, had a drink from his bucket, ate some hay, decorated the floor extensively with droppings and then walked quietly to the paddock with me for some grass.

Real, actual green grass! From the way his head plummeted to the ground when I unclipped his lead rope, it was clear he appreciated the stuff – but then he’s been in a field largely consisting of mud for weeks.

I brought Abe back in after an hour – I don’t want him to gorge on grass and give himself colic – and left him in the barn again eating his dinner, while I went back to bring Poppy and Dancer in, put the trailer back to restart trailer training from the beginning again, and then swung by my mother’s house and picked up my whippets.

They adore Cairnorchies. Room to run, dead rats to roll on (yes, Wicket managed to find the dead rat I took out of the water butt the other day!) and best of all, they’re allowed to sleep in bed with me here. They sniffed noses with Abe, all of them looking perfectly friendly towards each other, at night stables, then it was bedtime.

 

Actually, I think we are!

I’ve spent practically the whole day up at the croft, once I’d done the horses this morning. I threw everything from the stables, bar headcollars, leadropes and hoof picks, into the trailer and brought it all up to Cairnorchies this morning, where it’s now more or less put away. We’ve shovelled up the rubbish and bagged it for a tip trip at some point. We then had to wait for the hay, straw and wood pellets to be delivered, so I unpacked some boxes, sorted through stuff, put crockery away in the kitchen, lit the stove (it works fine – though I didn’t pile the wood in so it didn’t get very hot and I let it go out before I came home).

I also prepared a cage for the quail and made a nice bed for the geese.

That’s a couple of inches of woodshavings with about five inches of straw on top, so they’ve no excuse not to be snug and comfy in there! I’ll contact my friend Righa on Friday and see when she’d like to bring the geese up…. I must get the wire up for their run, though!

Finally Arthur Lee from Longley’s Farm Stores brought a van load of feed and bedding up – 30 sacks of wood pellets, 10 bales of straw and 10 bales of hay.

I’ve not used wood pellets before, so I’d done my homework last night on you-tube. Each sack was duly slit open, 3 scoops of water poured in, and then I left them alone for a while, to the accompaniment of a faint popcorn-like crackling and the slow expansion of the pellets. When I came back and turned the sacks over to empty them out, I was able to rake it all out to a fluffy soft bed about half the width of the horse barn and half the length! That should be enough room for a foal to find a cosy bed in…

It was getting dark by then, so I’ll take some pix tomorrow when Poppy and Dancer are in the barn. I rounded off the day by taking the trailer (now minus partitions, stashed in the long dairy shed overnight) back to the stables and parking it up ready to load up in the morning.

 

We decided today would be a good day to get the paddocks set up – not least because we’re stiff and sore after the work so far! Once the horses are safely installed we can dial back the effort and pace ourselves better on the long slog with everything else.

Electric fence is the easiest of fencing to get in place; simply walk the boundary of your proposed enclosure planting posts at regular intervals (ten strides, in this case), then go round with the wire, attach the insulated handles at the paddock entrance, and go back the way you came with the wire again at a different level.

Then you go round again to remove all the dock stalks sticking up and shorting the wire.

And again to tension up the wire now you’ve removed the docks.

And finally you take a bit of string and tie the corners back to solid fence posts.

All that achieved, we assembled the mounting post for the energiser, sank an earth anchor as a ground post, clipped crocodile clips onto the appropriate places (earth post, fence wire, battery terminals…. and the little red light on the energiser promptly flashed with the usual accompanying ticking noise. We left it disconnected after that check, of course, and stashed the battery in the shed for safety.

I was planning on setting up two paddocks next to each other for the horses to get to know each other, but the grass is so thick and rich, I daren’t! I shall have to ration them carefully – Poppy and Dancer are used to getting some grass, though not as thick as Cairnorchies grass, but Abe’s spent the past six weeks or so in a mud patch (all his own doing, mind you!) with a small pile of hay rather than grass, and if I don’t want him to explode I think I need to restrict his grazing somewhat.

I think what I’ll do is I’ll put them out for a couple of hours in the morning, bring them in for handling at lunchtime, put them back out in the afternoon, bring them in  again after a couple of hours, then perhaps pop them back out around three so they can top up on grass before the night. They can have hay through the night and we’ll slowly build them up. As they eat the grass down (which is good for the grass!) I’ll slowly extend the paddock or move it, so they’ll always have a little fresh grass to nibble on.

That much coming in and out and getting training and handling sessions will be great for them, anyway – Dancer needs to improve her leading skills, Abe can get back to longreining and I can start him learning to pull in his harness, and Poppy can get some me-time rather than being overshadowed by her offspring.

Hay, wood pellets and straw are due tomorrow afternoon, and I popped over to Peterhead this evening and bought a roll of rubble sacks, so tomorrow will largely be spent shovelling rubbish into sacks and stashing them in the small trailer to go to the tip.

I’ll bring the horse trailer over with all the stuff from the stables, bar headcollars and leadropes, at some point in the morning, and both unload all of that at Cairnorchies and take out the trailer’s partition, so when I pick Poppy and Dancer up  Thursday morning, they’ll have a nice big unimpeded space to travel in, rather than getting stuck under partitions or something horrible.

I also want to experiment with a way to drag rubbish and unwanted overgrown fencing out of the way, involving a tow rope and – since I don’t have George handy to learn to haul on it – the car’s towbar.

In amongst all this, I stumbled over something the previous owners had left behind amongst the rubbish. I’d noticed there was a coffee table in the stables with some boxes on it, but this morning I removed the boxes, finding they’re perfectly acceptable floor tiles (I have them earmarked for the kitchen floor, now) and then extracted the table from the heap of surrounding rubbish.

It’s an elegant little thing, isn’t it?

I like the line of the legs, and better yet, although it needs a good brush, the application of a damp soapy sponge, a little sandpaper and then a coat of linseed oil to bring the full beauty out, it looks like burr walnut!!

I’ve moved it to a safe dry corner of the workshop. When I have time, I’ll restore it and it’ll be back in the house, looking beautiful.

The reason I say this is because I spent a good chunk of this morning failing to drill holes in the things to get the slip rails up. I then went to our local DIY shop and bought a new masonry drill bit, took it back up and spent a large chunk of this afternoon failing to drill the same holes.

Plan B – when the straw and hay arrives, stack it in the doorway so the horses can’t go through to the other sheds.

On the plus side, though, I have eliminated one big problem. There are three gates into the field and they were all tied shut. Two are almost buried in grass, but the third – which is better placed anyway for what I want at the moment – was not quite so buried, though the wrong side of a length of fence I want to take down anyway.

I managed to get some of the wire off the rocky posts, folded it back and cut the gate loose. I’m going to use electric fence to make a gate (the trip to the DIY shop also took in our local Harbro store, so we spent a pile of money but have all the makings of the electric fence now) so the big heavy metal gate tied up with string, with no hinge pins on the post so it couldn’t be hung anyway, was merely an obstacle.

I dragged it clear of the grass that had grown over the bottom couple of bars and then caught my heel on something in the grass and fell over, with the gate on top of me.

At least it was clear of the weeds!

Having crawled out unhurt, I spent an arduous ten minutes dragging the gate over to the horse barn, where we managed to get it onto the hinge pins inside the rather flimsy double doors. It overlaps the wall by about three feet, which means the horses can’t push it open no matter how hard they may try, and it’s on the inside, so they’re not coming out that end of the shed without someone opening it for them first!

There’s now a lovely amount of light in there when the doors are open, so the horses will have a beautiful cool airy space to lounge in on hot summer days, with a nice view over the field into the bargain.

The really good news is, I no longer have to worry about getting a slip rail up inside those doors in case the horses lean on them and they fall down!

The slip rail inside the blocked door I plan on ripping down over the weekend is up, but that’s screwed into timber rather than breezeblocks. It’s just there so the horses can’t wander out of the shed at will yet.

I’ve thought out where the goose run will go, so that just needs some netting up and it’ll be ready for them.

Apart from that I spent a good half hour cleaning out the track for the big double sliding doors on the long dairy shed and wrenched the padlock off that was holding the double doors together, so I can now just open one at a time – that saves a lot of heaving and hauling at the vast deadweight! Having done that, I did more sweeping in there and nearly all the rubbish is now sitting in the drainage channels. I’ve taken care to keep it away from the actual drains, but it should be easier to shovel up in the channels. I haven’t measured this shed but I paced it out this afternoon and I reckon it’s 28 feet long, give or take a little. The previous owner apparently had a couple of hawks in there so I’ve unscrewed the perches from the wall the doors slide on (lack of joined up thinking there!) and there’s a mountain of pebbles that were under the perches. They were also in the process of migrating into the door tracks…. I found a bit of antler that had been discarded in the rubbish on the floor, presumably a dog treat, and went a little prehistoric, using it as a mini-pickaxe to scrape the trackway clean of mud, pebbles, chunks of wood and all sorts of litter.

Tomorrow I hope to take a barrow up, find some really sturdy rubble sacks and get the heaps of trash sacked up and ready to go to the tip. I’m also hoping to amalgamate two of the small stables, so then I’ll have two big, light stables – that will do for Abe in one and Poppy and Dancer in the other, for now. The new space will be 9 feet by 18, though, and I don’t know if George will fit. He’ll fit somewhere, of course, but possibly not quite in those stables! When I get him back, I’ll find out by experimentation.

 

From one weather extreme to another…. welcome to Scotland, home of 5-seasons-a-day flexibility!

This is the shed I swept out last night as the light was fading – it’s the smallest of the sheds, about the size of a good garage. I think it’s going to end up as my workshop for curing hides and making drums, though it needs some paint, new windows and appropriate furnishings by way of work table, shelves, etc first. The doors face south and the windows east, so it’ll have a good light for working through most of the day.

As you can see, there’s quite a lot of rubbish in the sweeping heap! The door to the right is the main entrance and is fine, provided you remember it’s in the frame upside down so you have to pull the handle up and turn the key the ‘wrong’ way. At the moment it gets me every time! I don’t know how structural the concrete wall between the doors is – if I could lose it I’d have a lot more useable space, so I may investigate with the advice of a builder! The other door, which lets in lots of light through all its holes, is rotten and I need to replace it – or possibly brick up the lower half and turn the top into a window. I shall have to be careful, however, because there’s a martin’s nest in the corner above the cupboard on the back wall. I’ll feel guilty if I don’t leave access for the martins to reach their nest!

Today was quite a bitty day, since my daughter’s reached the stage of trying to write up her dissertation and came home for the weekend to panic and ask for advice, and today I had to run her back to Aberdeen to catch her train back to Glasgow. We went up to Cairnorchies in the morning to measure up and mark the wood for the various slip rails, which is done, and dropped off more tools, extension flex and so forth. I also diverted from the plan because there’s a persistent dribble from one of the overflow pipes in the loft which lands in a water butt by the door – and it had overflowed from the butt overnight, soaked the doorstep and then frozen, making a wonderfully treacherous and perfectly invisible trap for anyone attempting to get into the house.

I bailed out the butt with a bucket, evicted the corpse of a drowned rat, washed it out and blocked the butt up so it’s now level and high enough to get a bucket under the tap (it needs a new tap, mind you…). This means the water is now being caught in a useful and non-doorstep-soaking manner, which will do for now. The butt doesn’t have a lid and the hole is big enough to dip a bucket in, so I can bail it out as required.

Having sorted out the butt, I chipped off the ice from the step with a spade and swept it away, and then all was safe again.

After I’d dropped my daughter in Aberdeen I went back up to spend more time working before the light faded.

I’ve swept out the old coal shed, washed it out by throwing lots of buckets of water into it (that water butt again!) and left it to dry – it’s the shed closest to the house on the north end and will be our goose house when the geese arrive. It also has concrete shelves in it, which I can’t move because they’re so heavy and solid! I washed those off too and they’ll do fine for the quail. The window needs a little tlc with perspex instead of timber, followed by a good wash, I think, and then, when the floor’s dry again, it’ll be fine for me to put down a shavings bed with straw on top for the geese.

After that I went to walk the field and decide where to put an initial paddock or two for the horses. The fence along the road is sound and has spacers for electric fence, though the one at the back is flimsy and there’s too much barbed wire involved all round. The little wood at the end of our land is incredibly neglected, scrubby and consists almost entirely of sycamore – which is poisonous to horses – so I’ll be keeping the horses away from that until I’ve cleared the sycamore and planted the area up again with non-toxic native trees. I did see a patch of pigeon feathers under one of the conifers, though, so someone’s catching pigeons and plucking them up the tree – one of the falcons, quite possibly either sparrowhawk or peregrine. I’ll look forward to finding out, one day!

Fresh deer droppings – from the size, I’d say probably roe (the most common species round here). How they arrange to have one end slightly pointy, the other slightly dimpled I have never found out!

That end of the field is also quite rushy, meaning it’s damp, so I shall probably dig out a pond there at some point – it’ll be fun for the horses, good for wildlife and will help drain the rest of the wet area.

 

I finished yesterday’s post by saying I hoped to reopen the blocked doorway from the end stable, the biggest of them, into the horse barn. After a solid session with the drill and screwdriver bit, not to mention a collection of about two dozen good-condition screws, we completed that job. Here’s the doorway now it’s clear – the door sticks a little and is quite thin wood, but it’s entirely usable and will enable me to get a fairly direct route in for the horses that doesn’t involve trekking them through three other sheds to reach the horse barn! I think they’ll all learn to handle that step easily enough – it’s not that deep.

This is the view in the opposite direction. There’s an intriguing hole in the wall that has a few loose bricks balanced in it – won’t be hard to fill in and mortar them in place, or maybe turn it into a small window! The huge pipe on the left is earthenware and very thick – I assume it’s connected with the former dairy in some way. It should be ok with a horse in there, though – it’s solid, very tough (I tried hitting a spare piece with a hammer and the hammer just bounced!) and there are no sharp projections. The stable itself is ten feet deep and seventeen from end to end – George might find it a bit tight one way when he’s full grown, but it’s certainly big enough for any of the others. When Ceilidh arrives, this will be her space at night. Until then it’ll just be a walkway for the other horses as they come and go.

Having opened up the route into the stables, this was the view. As you can see, it’s untidy! I’ve been just dumping stuff at the far end, all the doors were left open (the boxes hadn’t been mucked out!) and there’s rubbish in them as well. The stable at the far end is incredibly dark and has the most uneven floor I’ve ever seen in a stable as well as having the door off its hinges – but since all these are basically 9 foot by 9, they’re all too small for my lot and will get revamped later.

To begin with, we pulled out every projecting nail, screw and staple we could find, swept the floors, rehung the unhinged door and tidied the feed bins and buckets into the dark end stable, hung up all the headcollars and halters and closed the doors. It made a huge difference!

Here’s the end result. On the right you can see the boarded up doorway that will be a project over next weekend, I think – I don’t want to unboard it until I’m living in the house, since it’ll leave an effortless way for anyone to just walk into the buildings. I will fit slip rail brackets on the inside, ready to put slip rails up once the horses have arrived, because I plan on this being their way into the barn.

A closer view of the inside of the boards.

And a view from the outside. The rail for a sliding door is still there, and one day I’ll reinstate it properly to weatherproof the shed again.

I made a second trip up after evening stables with the microwave and the rest of the feed bins, plus a few more boxes of stuff for inside the house. the microwave is now up on the brackets for it in the kitchen and having tidied stuff into stables and house respectively, I swept out the workshop shed, which is the smallest of them. By then it was getting too dark for my phone, so I’ll take photos tomorrow.

There’s a lot of very basic elbow grease jobs that are needed before we can do anything else at Cairnorchies – so today we started with two of them. My mother made a start on window cleaning, and I started sweeping out the sheds.

It’s made a huge difference inside the house – as in, we can now admire the views and there’s a lot more light in the rooms. It’s also made a similar difference in the sheds – here’s a few before-and-after pix.

It’s amazing what can be achieved with a simple yard brush! My back is complaining this evening…. though not loudly enough to drown out the sense of achievement!

Along the way I discovered some evidence of the wildlife in the area.

This is a nest that had been built in one of the old water drinkers for the cows – alas, I suspect the nest was abandoned due to waterlogging, since otherwise the parents would have removed an unhatched egg and the drinkers are certainly full of water where the roof leaks on them! I would say, from the egg, that this was a robin’s nest. We also have some house martin nests tucked away in odd corners, so I must make sure I leave flight paths for them to return and nest again when I’m fixing windows and doors!

There was a massive difference in the noise and wind getting into the various sheds – the stable shed and the big shed were quiet and the air was still, despite some vicious gusts and heavy driving rain outside, but the two dairy sheds were noisy and cold. It backs up my choice of housing the horses in the big shed, which may henceforth be known as the Horse Barn. There’s a loose sheet of corrugated iron on the roof of the stable that’s folded back overnight – I may put a ladder up against the wall and simply put it back in place and weight it down for the moment, but at some point it’ll need a proper fix – including a few new, non-rotten roof beams!

Roofing is a little beyond the limits of my skill set, so I’ll have to get people in and get quotes, then save up.

I’ve decided to go for a semi-deep-litter system for the horses – a layer of wood pellets as a base, with straw on top. The straw should last longer because all the moisture drains through into the wood pellets, which are highly absorbent, so it should be a case of a quick toss of the straw each day to fluff it up, the removal of any droppings and then a weekly dig-out of wet sawdust and a top-up. My local feed store are going to deliver 30 sacks of wood pellets, a pallet of straw bales and another pallet of hay bales, which should keep them all comfy and fed for a while.

Tomorrow’s jobs: unblock the door from the horse barn to the stable block, finish sweeping the sheds, and if possible wash down the kitchen units, walls, etc. There are brackets on the wall for a microwave, so to begin with I’ll take a spare one up and use that for any cooking that’s required.

Oh, and I need to talk to the TV licensing people. They’re threatening legal action because the previous owners didn’t have a licence… I’ve no intention of getting one either, nor of watching TV!