Banana Conquers the Chaos | The Taming of the Tack Room

So one of the reasons that City Chick likes Banana so much is that Banana is not intimidated by the Farm Girl Scale of Doing Things. See, Farm Girl thinks, acts and delivers on epic levels. Our favorite motto at Farm Narnia is that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. There are two places where this is particularly apparent (and gets us into a little bit of trouble): The Studio (City Chick can’t even think about it . . . it threatens to explode her brain) and Farm Girl’s Tack Room.

Farm Girl’s Tack Room has had some, how to put this, extreme growth spurts over the last 18 months or so. Originally home to a smallish collection of grooming equipment, first-aid supplies and a handful of actual tack, it had, despite several attempts on both Farm Girl and City Chick’s parts, literally exploded after a few shopping excursions and several large donations to the rescue from a local tack sale. The sheer scale it was functioning on combined with some of the Kuhs Crew utilizing it when riding, the need to do an “insta-clean” of the barn – shoving anything in the aisle behind a closed door – and Farm Girl’s tendency to create a myriad of small piles . . . well, it looked as though the horse gods had thrown up a used tack and farm supply store in there, with a side of horse cookies and a garnish of horsehair.

City Chick made some brave attempts over the summer to tame the beast, errr, tack room. Farm Girl at one point moved everything into the hallway. City Chick made some, well, “edits” to the collection during its aisle days before it all got hurled back into the room and safely away behind a closed door during an “insta-clean”. City Chick felt the room had beaten her and her organizational zest. So whenever she felt urges to rearrange Farm Girl’s tack room, she’d slink off to dust, sweep and tidy her own tack room instead.  (City Chick fully admits having an entire tack room when she has only one horse is ridiculous.  But it is OK because having 3 saddles and 4 bridles for one horse is an absolute necessity, right?)

But then . . . the brilliant Banana got a bug up her butt (or a bee in her bonnet) . . . and 2 dedicated (to drinking and cleaning?) days later went from this (City Chick is pretty sure some cleaning had already happened before Banana thought to document – it already looks tidier in these):

To this:

There are still a few details to work on (the collection of halters might be a blog post in and of itself) and some additional, um, editing, to be done, but what a difference!  Banana, you’re the best!