Thursday, June 12, 2014

Slowly coming along

I've been slowly working on my horse trailer! Far more slowly than I'd like, but so far:

Today I pulled out the mats and finally got a good look at the floor boards. With the more expert help of my brother and my dad, we've decided we're gonna put untreated oak down. My brother works for a construction/black topping company, and this is what they use on their open flat bed trailers to haul the road equipment. He said the untreated oak would be stronger and last longer than pressure treated pine or anything. The people who put the current floor in apparently didn't know that you're supposed to space the boards at all, they were smashed tight together and were holding moisture. The rubber mats that I pulled out were basically long rubber strips like from tires or something that were 'sewn' together. In other words, they did jack for preventing urine from hitting the boards and then sitting there! I figure I'm going to have my oak boards spaced, and then put solid mats on top, with bedding, that way vast majority of wet spots gets trapped in bedding where it can be picked out and doesn't sit on the wood floors.

I've had to scoop out a mosquito-larva laden puddle out of the manger. I'll still have to clean that out well, though thankfully the water's all out of it.

Mom and I are going to buy the vinyl fabric needed to recover all the mats (black! Unless I find really cool red vinyl, then I want red!) since a couple of them are really really torn up. I'll have to get some more plyboard to use as backing there though.

I also need to fix the lights, some of them aren't working. And, I also need to find a way to turn the plug-in on my jeep for the lights, the trailer plug won't fit the box because it's sideways instead of straight back-facing.

And then I also want to remove all the decals (shame, some of them I like, although there's a fade-through on the front of the For Sale sign that was on it and on the drivers side there's the outline of an old decal that reads Save a Horse... Ride a Cowboy!) and power wash and repaint. I'm going to keep the white/black/red color scheme because it's absolutely adorable, but I also want to paint the inside (it looks like crap, the inside paint is spattered with black and shriveled and cracking) and scrub rust off the latches and handles and hinges and give them all a good WD-40 treatment.