WhirldWorks Farm
A small homestead and Debouillet sheep farm in Central Texas
This post will floor you! Part Two
I could feel the anticipation rising, so decided it was time to reveal our solution to the barn floor issues we have been experiencing. We have run through so many ideas over the past couple of years trying to solve this, but we settled on building a wooden deck inside the barn.
It seems so strange now, but in all our discussions about the barn, I don’t recall us ever contemplating a wooden floor. Even in all our research it was not an idea we had come across. That was until someone suggested it as it is how they solved their problems. Then, all of a sudden, our internet searches were met with plenty of ideas and tips for wooden barn floors. I don’t always like it when there are “plenty of ideas” because it makes researching the “right” solution to our individual problem harder to choose. I do realize however that many options make multiple solutions for varying situations more tenable.
Anyway, we talked about the options, then sketched out our idea and determined how much material we were going to need for our project. Because time is not a luxury we experience often, we took advantage of convenience and ordered the material online. The following Friday night I zipped over to the big box store where our lumber was already waiting for me. Thankfully, a couple of helpful employees even aided me in loading it all into our trailer.
It sure seemed like an awful lot of weight for our little 5×8 pull behind and I even had had pieces 16 feet long lashed to the top rail. Yeah, I should have taken a picture, but I was hungry and eager to get home. I took it easy driving all that lumber home and made it to within about 100 feet of our driveway. As usual I drove slow down our obstacle curse some call a road, but I hit one of the vehicle swallowing “potholes” a little too fast nearly lost the whole load. The trailer jumped off the hitch, landed on what passes for pavement in the country and made quite a racket. It didn’t take long to get it back where it belonged though and I had it safely on our farm, ready for Saturday morning.
We started by running those 16 foot long pressure-treated 2x4s down the long side of the pen. We installed them a few inches above the dirt floor so there will be some measure of airflow underneath. Once those were securely in place, we cut two 2x4s about 4 feet long, and propped them up so they were parallel and level with the runners. On these 2x4s we installed the 2×4 decking. Once all the decking was installed we removed the blocks propping them up so that the decking is what held the weight whole pallet. We did it this way because we know we will need to get access to the dirt floor occasionally to clean it. Lift up a pallet, and there’s the old dirt floor.
It only took one night to realize that I hadn’t put enough space between the deck boards. The next morning the poop was everywhere, including being stuck to the sheep. I had to go back and take out every single screw and reattach the boards with enough space between them to allow the “garden gold” to fall to the ground below. It’s been a couple of weeks now since finishing this project and so far it appears to be just what we’ve needed all this time.
WhirldWorks Farm 
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