Organize the Barn

I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent the first couple days of the new year (as well as the last several days of 2009) cleaning, decluttering and organizing. I’m always excited and hopeful about new beginnings, but I feel even better about them with a clean slate, so to speak.

Your working environment—be it a barn, office or home—plays an enormous role in your productivity. If you feel depressed or frustrated by your surroundings, how motivated will you be to work in them?

If you think you need to organize the barn, it isn’t as big a task as you might expect. All the groundwork has already been laid; you just need to learn how to use the space effectively.

Step One: Create Work Stations

The hallmark of a well-organized space is the delineation of work stations. There should be a place in your barn dedicated to every possible task, from tacking up to giving injections, to riding and mixing grain.

Create a list of all the work stations in your barn. It might include wash stalls, grooming stalls, tack room, feed room, barn office, bathrooms, rec area, stocks, arenas, storage sheds and even the parking lot. Then, under each item, list the tasks performed in those stations.

Step Two: Purchase Furniture/Equipment

You can’t organize the barn without furniture and equipment. These are the tools with which you organize clutter and keep it out of the barn aisles, office and other common areas.

Tack trunks, storage totes, filing cabinets, bookshelves, stackable drawers, hooks and racks can all be used or repurposed to organize the barn. For example, I’ve often used a particle board bookshelf to store plastic boxes of bits, tools or other items.

Step Three: Reassigning Clutter

Clutter accumulates because you don’t have a place to put stuff—or because the place you’ve designated is not convenient to where you work. For example, if you keep your grooming utensils in the tack room but you tack up in a wash stall, you have to walk several feet (or longer) to extract utensils and put them away. You’ll find yourself just dropping the brushes and combs and hoof picks on the floor in the wash stall because it’s more convenient.

Therefore, you need to make a place in each of your work stations for the tools you use there. Some things are more important than others; for example, it might not be convenient to store saddles and bridles in front of each horse’s stall. However, you can make it easier for yourself and clients by making sure there is a tack room convenient to all stalls in the barn.

If you frequently mix grain with supplements, for example, you might put a medicine cabinet in the feed room. This way, when you’re mixing grain, you can just reach in the cabinet for supplements and additives you need.

Redundancy is sometimes necessary to reduce clutter when you organize the barn. I mentioned above that you might want a receptacle for grooming supplies near the wash stalls if that’s where you tack up, but you can keep one in front of each horse’s stall as well, or one in the tack room.

Step Three: Labeling

I can’t stress the importance of these step enough. If you don’t clearly mark storage receptacles, shelves and other organizational tools, you will quickly forget where things are kept and wind up tossing them every which way. This isn’t organization—it’s chaos.

Dust, dirt and wind will conspire to eventually remove most labels from your organizational tools, but by the time that happens you will have memorized where everything goes. If not, you can always reapply labels or fix them to things with plastic covers to protect them.

This is especially important if you are a riding instructor because new students don’t know where you keep things. I still remember moving from Oklahoma to Texas when I was thirteen, starting at a new barn, and getting so confused because I couldn’t find anything when my instructor left me alone to tack up.

Step Four: Using the Organized Barn

You can organize the barn every week for the whole of 2010, but if you don’t keep up with your organizational strategy it was all for nothing.

Every time you go to put something away or take something from its place, make a mental note to put it back exactly where it belongs. It will take a few weeks to break old habits but eventually it will become second nature.

So what about you? What are your organizational techniques? How did you organize the barn, what worked, and what didn’t work?

You might also like:

1. Space-Savers for Barn Storage
2. 7 Ways to Spruce Up the Barn
3. Organize Your Horse Business
   with Riding Lesson Plans
4. How to Stop Theft at the Barn
5. When You’re Away: Leaving the Barn in Good Hands

About the Author: Laura Jane Thompson is the Chief Equestrian Officer of Riding Instructor University and the Feature writer for the horses section at Suite101. She believes that any horse business can succeed provided its owner practices smart strategy.