Hey there! Remember one of my first posts, when we first started our farm? Well, we are nearly 6 years into it since we moved here. Can you believe that? 6 years already! When we found this place, my plan/goal was to create a horse facility. I had one horse at the time, and I wanted to get back into giving riding lessons, plus work on furthering my own riding career specifically in natural horsemanship training and dressage.
Things haven’t quite gone exactly as I hoped and I’m not where I wanted to be by now. We’ve taken some detours trying to make money with the farm selling chicken eggs, grass fed beef and pastured organic whole chicken. Those things have helped some. It’s not a lot of money but it’s helped pay for a few things. Last year I was finally able to get my area for an arena cut out and sanded. We were also able to buy an old horse trailer that my dad has fixed up (it’s just waiting to get the floor put back in now).
3 summers ago I started giving some lessons to a friends children, but then broke my ankle late 2019 (not horse related) and had a long recovery period. Then with Covid shutdowns and quarantines I didn’t get to give any riding lessons in 2020. Last year, however, I got to add a couple more students over the spring through fall and I thoroughly enjoyed working with these kids! I feel like it’s baby steps, but things are moving in that direction.
The problem with only having an outdoor arena, especially here in Oregon, is that you really can’t do much riding during the rainy season. So pretty much October through April or May I have to shut down the riding lessons. That makes it difficult to gain and keep students. Plus I can’t really do any of my own riding for nearly half the year. I could haul somewhere to ride but we just got our horse trailer last year and it’s not quite finished being renovated yet. It is also very difficult to find a stable that will allow you to give lessons using their facilities. Not to mention they are going to charge quite a bit to basically rent the arena, and it costs money in gas to haul my horse there if the student is using my horse.
So this year we found out that we can refinance the mortgage and get enough cash out to at least pay for materials for a 60x120ft roof only arena. We received one quote on materials so far and I have to say, it was a bit of a shock. I realized that the price of lumber is still up right now but the material quote for just a roof only, no sides enclosed at all is $51,000. Yikes. We are able to get a little over that with the refinance, but we had some other things we were hoping to do with part of the money too like adding a master bedroom to our 2 bedroom house so that the 2 boys that are still in the house don’t have to share a room anymore and we can actually have a comfortable master bedroom. We have 3 boys and none of them have really ever had their own room except our oldest for a short time in our old house.
So, we will be able to get just enough money to buy the materials for the arena and then we have some friends/family that know what they are doing and can help build it, but we do need to make sure we have enough to pay for the help.
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