Revisiting the Padded Stall
For some reference, the barn we are in has stalls with attached runs. The stalls have wood walls, but the stall doors and the runs are pipe. I padded (duct tape over pool noodles) a couple parts of Ro’s run.
First, the top rail of her stall door. The pipe is rough and she was rubbing her chest raw against it. Easy fix:
It looks good, right?
Here’s the problem. I firmly believe home improvement type things should be Somebody Else’s Problem. I am awesome with words. Hammer and nails? Not so much. So when I padded the rail, I was standing on the outside of the stall and my non-engineering brain did not quite catch on to the inevitable issue caused by working on that side of the door:
That’s right. I padded the outside of the rail, not the inside. My pool noodle was not nearly as wide as I thought it was. Despite my error, it’s working just fine—the rubs on her chest have disappeared. I probably could have skipped the pool noodle and just taped over the rail.
I can’t take credit for the idea. You can see the colored tape in the distance where some other people have already done similar things to their stalls. Some of them have also taped up one of the vertical support rails, but Ro isn’t rubbing on that so I haven’t bothered.
The other part of the stall that needed padding are the ends of the pipes where the run meets the stall:
The pipe ends aren’t capped, which you can see from the bottom rail. You can see my temporary fix on the middle rail; I still need to get to the home improvement store and find some more durable caps. But first I need to remember to measure the diameter of the pipes.