First I had some prep work for the barn. Friday I cleaned out the barn. I had 15 bales of straw and I carried them up to the attic after sweeping the dust out of there. I also put the two hay bales I had left from last year in the attic.
I removed this structure. I'm not sure what is was for, perhaps to hold hay for livestock allowed in the barn?
Years ago to keep sunlight off the hay I hung these old coats over the two windows.
I replaced the coats with window blinds.
The two new horses were a pain as they wanted to come in the barn to check things out and to lick up the stray loose hay on the floor.
A clean and empty barn.
As you can see Wyatt's bale wagon stacks the bales high. Eight rows high. The wagon holds 55 bales.
The stack is so high I have to use a ladder to remove the bales from the top two rows.
When my Uncle Larry rewired the barn a few years ago I had him attach the light to a board nailed to the ceiling beam. I wanted the light low enough so the beam didn't block the light from the bulb. Last year I discovered the light was a touch too low as I broke the bulb when I tossed the top bale on the stack under the light. Friday I removed the board and attached the light to the ceiling beam. This gave me just enough room to safely stack the bales under the light.
I was able to move the first stack of 55 bales by the time Wyatt arrived with another stack. Fortunately he had to bale more hay bales so I had a break before he arrived with the third stack. I still had a few bales to move when he arrived with the forth stack. I then had him alternate placing bales in his hay barn with bringing me the fifth and sixth stacks. I was slowing down as the day when on. It was good to have breaks between the fourth, fifth and sixth stacks, but I found I was starting to get stiff in the time between working.
The strings on the bales are not super tight. Since my stacks are only five rows high this is not a problem. I did have a problem when two bale were loose enough that they came out of the strings when I carried them against my leg. Argh! I stuffed the loose hay from these two bales in the gap on the right side. If the barn was one foot wider I could have had a complete stack of 10 and not a single stack of five.
Wyatt's bales are about 60 lbs each. That means 33 bales make a ton of hay. 330 bales total. So I moved 10 tons of hay on Sunday. No wonder I was tired at the end of the day.
Here is a 1:07 minute video of the hay bale wagon in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkEE2fLy5Wo
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