We’ve spent every spare minute working on our barn addition, which is actually an indoor goat milking parlor. Hey y’all it’s even climate controlled. People keep asking when it will be finished and we keep saying ‘Two more weeks…’. I think we’ve been saying that since last year. I tend to be very optimistic regarding days to completion when it comes to construction work. Kim tends to be a lot more realistic. However, I think we can really say it now and it might even be true.
Just two more weeks and the facility will be completed enough that we can have visitors and open our little farm store. The pictures in this article were taken around March 10th or so.
We produced a lot of goat milk soap the first six weeks of 2023. It was too cold and wet to work on the milk room so we worked on soap making. Finally the weather was decent enough in late February to install the outside siding. We still have to paint the exterior and complete the soffits/trim. The work on this addition to the soap facility/barn started on March 25th, 2022 when we poured the cement for the floor. From there it slowly and painfully progressed into the structure we have today.
So far three of our nannies have had kids. There’s still four more does that will deliver over the next couple of months. We’ve held off on milking so far until the milk room is ready for production. Once we begin daily milking there will not be a break till the end of the year. We will milk our goats every single morning until December and possibly longer.
About all that’s left on the interior is to build a second milking stand. Our Malesty milking machine is designed to milk two goats at the same time, so we need two stands. We moved a chest freezer in recently. We have a spare fridge that’s going in this weekend. The milk room also has a sink with cold and hot water. To ensure we have enough electricity we had Dixie Electric run a new 200 amp service to the structure. This enabled us to power everything we will ever need (hopefully). This facility features two mini-split AC units, a water heater, fancy milking machine, and even a mini-fridge. Kim says I have to build a bathroom out there soon for our visitors. I suppose I could crank that out in two more weeks :).
