The Tack Room
When we moved out here to Cat Spring,TX the barn was a big open building so we reworked it into a functioning barn. One third of the building is my husband's workshop. The other two thirds is divided into three stalls, an area for hay storage and the tack room.
The tack room isn't very large - just 9' by 11' by 8'. It's fully enclosed with a wide heavy metal door and a good lock. It holds all the critical stuff for the animals. There are saddle racks and saddles, halters and bridles, feed for all the animals, supplements and brushes along with a small refrigerator to store medications and gatorade. There is one window that's mostly filled with the heater/air conditioning unit that basically runs full time. It is the brains of our livestock program.
Wow. That sounds pretty impressive. It's not impressive. It's just a nice size closet to safely store everything I need.
Last fall the heating and air conditioning unit started to act erratic. If I had the air conditioning on the unit would freeze up. If I turned on the heat the unit would also freeze up. And turning it off didn't actually turn it off. To get it to stop whatever it was doing I had to unplug it. I hoped it was something as simple as a busted thermostat. At that point in the year I didn't need air conditioning anymore, I needed some heat. But I have a dehumidifier in the tack room and that managed to put out enough heat that I lasted all the way through the winter without any problems. Then spring came.
You probably have noticed that I did my "...no, no. I'll wait till I need it to work in the spring to start thinking about having it repaired..." thing. Let's put off until later what we don't want to deal with right now. I can worry about this when it becomes critical. Sometimes this works and sometimes not so much.
In this case.... A Big Win for Penny! I called Columbus TV & Appliance yesterday afternoon. I explained the issues. Turns out even though the unit is nearly three years old, the guts of it are still under warranty. And the guts of it are exactly where the thermostat problem lies. Two gentlemen showed up first thing this morning with a new unit for my tack room. It took them less than 15 minutes to rip out the old unit and replace it with a brand new unit and then test it to make sure it was cooling properly.
I love Columbus TV & Appliance, by the way. The store is on the main drag in Columbus. It's not huge and they don't have the kind of inventory that the big box stores do but they have always had exactly what we need. They brought us a new wall oven when our original one died. They installed the original and subsequent heating/AC units for my tack room. Last summer we bought our Speed Queen washing machine from them. They are wonderful to deal with and I recommend them to anyone.
The weather people have suggested we may get to nearly 90 degrees today. But my tack room is nicely cool! Yay!