Fun With Flooring

Our horse barn is pretty warm and cozy but the floor has always been a problem. It is just dirt and it is very soft and tends to hold water so it is often pretty wet and sloppy. It seems like the slope of the ground has always meant that a "stream" of water ran cross-wise across the barn floor from the northwest corner down to the southeast corner. Anyway we hated how wet it was and it kept us from being able to put up box stalls, plus it was hard to walk around in there after a rain.

We happen to live near several steel mills and we found out that they give away slag for free, you just have to pay to haul it. A number of our friends and neighbors use it for driveways, flooring for animals, etc. so we have been tossing the idea around. As luck would have it, we have a friend who has dump trucks and does hauling and our Amish neighbor has a Bobcat with a bucket that can spread the slag out (we barter his help with stuff like that in return for driving his wife around). The cool thing about the slag , besides being free, is that as it compacts and gets wet it hardens up so the horses walking on it tamps it down and makes a nice, hard floor for us. For a couple hundred bucks in hauling costs we got what would have been a very expensive floor if we had used regular concrete or even stone not only delivered but spread out. We even had enough left over to fill in some low spots outside of the barn. As cheap as that slag is I can see us getting even more and extending the barn concrete pad out into their paddock. Anyway, here are some random pictures for your viewing pleasure!



The original pile of slag, pre-snow!



The horses on the new flooring



Our mule Lola coming to see what I am doing, she is a camera hog! It is really hard
to take pictures when she is in your face wherever you go.