Sharing another project I did before the eye/cataract saga. Back when I could lift things and bend over without fear of detaching a retina…

Eh. Its only a temporary setback.

You may or may not remember that we’ve been storing the saddles and other tack in the workshop area of the casita. 

My workshop.

Where I keep my tools and do messy things with paint and sawdust.

Anyway, we can’t store them in the feed room for obvious reasons so its basically that or move them to another shed which is out of the way and we have to carry things when we want to use them……. though, with the amount of riding we do lately, would that be such a bad thing….?

Hm…

Must think about that…

Meanwhile, it doesn’t matter cause I’ve finally sorted out saddle storage in a way that takes up less space, is safe for us (ie no saddles falling on heads) and is safe for the saddles (ie no saddles falling on heads).

It was easy. Basically. It just took a long time to do from inception to completion. And I used only things I had on hand.

I have a fence in the middle of the workshop area of the casita. It was there cause the shed was being used as a shearing shed when we bought here. When we cleaned the place up and put in a new floor, we didn’t worry about removing the entire fence. Its been handy for tossing horse rugs and even hanging saddles off.

The problem of putting saddles over the fence, however, was that they took up space on both sides of the fence, thus limiting what I could do on the other side. So what I did was basically make a kind of saddle ‘tree’ to hang them off, thus limiting the spread…

I began by attaching a long piece of hardwood to the fence in several places and up onto an exposed beam in the ceiling so it was secure. This became the ‘trunk’. I then made three triangles out of timber and attached them to the trunk, each one a ‘branch’ for one saddle. The bottom branch holds Wayne’s western saddle (very heavy) so that got an upright support as well.

To finish it off, I used an old piece of pipe I had, cut to length, to create a rounded rest for the protection of the saddle upholstery. Mind you, I also put saddle blankets over the pipe and over the saddles for added protection.

The other side – minus saddles hanging over, taking up space. I’m can now push cabinets and other things up against the fence and have more room to work.

While sprucing the place up, I even sprayed the side of this old locker gold for a bit of class…