the great stall mat hunt

I've been on a stall mat mission over the past week. You see, when I was thinking about moving Lucy to the new barn, I made sure to be very clear on what I wanted out of it: a big turnout space, a stall in the barn, stall mats in that stall, and a secure place to store my things. I got all of those except the stall mats. I resolved to just trying the stall out without mats in it, so Lucy has been coming in each night and doing some pretty good damage to the flooring in the stall. It was previously packed hard and flat, and by the time yesterday rolled around, it was already developing a dip in the center of the stall, and she had put a bunch of rivets all around it. Since I use the pellet bedding, cleaning it was kind of a huge pain in the rear because the pellet bedding is as fine as the material they packed the stall floor with. They were blending together into a nasty looking heavy mess and I wasn't happy with it at all.

I did some research to find out how much stall mats are and found they are about $40-45 if you buy them new from a feed supply store. I needed 5 mats to do Lucy's stall and Claire also wanted to do Boe's stall, so ten in total. That would have been a lot of money that I really don't have to spend on rubber mats right now. I decided to look elsewhere, and found an ad on Craigslist for stall mats for $20-25 each.

So we drove to CT yesterday evening and picked ten mats up. I am so happy we got a good deal on them. Kenny slaved away for us to install them, which took a lot of time and energy. Boy those things are heavy!!

The difference they made is already apparent, though. I cleaned Lucy's stall early this morning and it took me so much less time with the mats than without.