When it comes to renovating your home, there are a number of tasks that you can achieve. However with ranch style homes, renovating them can often be harder and many people simply do not know where to start. If you are wanting to update your ranch home but you simply do not know where to start then it would be a good idea to go through each room and see whether there is anything specifically you could change.

The Secret to Ranch Renovations

There area number of renovations that can be done to a ranch style home. However, when you look at the opinion of most people, there are a few renovations that are more popular than others. The outside of the home is particularly one area which you can do a lot with. You could add a deck to the garden or even an enclosed patio area.

The interior of a ranch home tends to have wooden paneling and stone fireplaces. Wood does tend to be a popular theme in any ranch home and so you should stick with that when you are making any renovations. Wooden features not only make the home more modern, but they also look really good too. This means that they will add value to the home and that will come in very handy if you plan to sell the home in the future.

Usually people who are renovating their ranch homes are looking to sell the home in the near future. However, there are other people who simply want to renovate their home to make it more pleasing to them. However no matter whether you want to make changes to sell your home or not you should always consider how it will affect the price of your home regardless. So looking at improvements that will increase the value of the home are best. Also try to save as much money as possible if you want to make the most profit.

Overall all ranch style renovations can add value to your home. Just as long as you put plenty of effort into the changes and you do enough research you should easily be able to complete any ranch renovations. Keep in mind that all changes should try to have a wooden theme. The most popular ranch renovations include ones that allow you to have more space. If you get stuck for ideas then start with the basement. You can add partitions to give you extra rooms or you could simply try to make the basement warmer so it is more comfortable in colder months. Whatever you want to update in your home, it can be achieved with a lot of hard work.

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More and more people are using steel buildings for many different reasons. First of all, steel buildings are very versatile because they are used as sport arenas, garages, and even homes. They are quick to build, which is great for companies needing steel buildings because of the rapid changes they undergo. There’s also no more having to wait months on end for a new building to be built for incredibly large amounts of money. Steel buildings are affordable as well.

But what about the people wishing to use a steel building as a horse barn? Is it safe?

Well, let’s put it this way: If a steel building can be made into a home in which people live, then there is no reason why steel buildings cannot be used to house horses. That is rather amazing for a building material that was considered to be unusual just a century ago. Steel wasn’t mass produced until 1855 and it still took time for the versatility and the benefits to be recognized.

The physical and the chemical characteristics of steel make it ideal for building. Simply look at its chemical composition. It has a certain percentage of carbon in it, but is mostly made up of iron. The iron itself will slide past each other if cut into sheets, which makes it very soft. When the carbon is added in, the metal becomes considerably stronger. That’s what gives us steel and gives the steel manufacturers the ability to make various types of steel, which makes such structures as steel barns possible.

You want the main frame of the barn to be very strong, so that is, of course, going to require a harder type of steel. For other parts of the building, the steel doesn’t need to be as hard, so there is more iron and less carbon to make the steel softer and more flexible where it needs to be.

As for horse barns, horse owners are using steel buildings because they are low maintenance and bug infestation is not an issue. That means no carpenter bees and no termites eating away at wood. Steel also cannot develop mold, mildew, or any other type of fungi that may decide it likes to grow in a horse barn. It can certainly try, but nothing is going to happen if the barn is made of steel. A steel horse barn means more attention is paid to the animals and less attention is paid to the upkeep of the barn. Other things to take into consideration when using a steel barn is that there is a low risk of it becoming infested with parasites that can make the horses ill. We’ve also seen the horror stories where hay or straw has caught fire and the horses have no way of getting out of the barn because the entire structure is ablaze. The good news is that the risk of such a fire is reduced significantly since steel is not combustible. Even if fire would break out, there is a good chance the roof and the walls would not collapse since steel can endure incredibly high temperatures.

This makes the only concern being what size of steel building is needed. Of course that is going to depend on how many horses you have or how many you hope to have if you’re just starting out. But what is great is that steel buildings are safe to use as horse barns and in many ways keeps your horses safer than if they were in a barn made of wood or another type of building material.

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Selecting a house cow is usually a pretty personal preference. Some people want a lot of milk, so they would be looking at something like a Friesian. They give quite a lot, often more watery than creamy. Although having said that individual cows give different types of milk Me, I always liked a Jersey. Only the one bucket of milk with a very good cream content. Enough to make my own butter, have some buttermilk to use for cooking and good rich milk for the children to drink. Also had enough cream to make pure cream icecream. Kept the neighbours in milk as well. Any left over went to the pig. A housecow is a very good investment. She will give you all the milk, butter, cream you want plus she can raise a calf for meat at the same time.

Regardless of what cow you are going to buy, there are certain attributes that are the best “buys”. A good straight back, the saying is a square looking cow. However, you need to think of a rectangle more than a square with four feet. The udder is very important. After all, this is what you are buying. Preferably square (that word again) meaning it hangs evenly. Four teats, I know you are saying like right they all have four teats. Not so! Some have extra teats on the udder, not that they work, but they do get in the way sometimes of milking.

The next thing to consider is who is going to be doing the milking. If it is a man, then he will normally prefer a cow with good size teats as most men have larger hands. That means a bigger cow usually than a jersey as they usually have little teats. I have small hands, so the jersey suits me down to the ground whereas the others I have trouble getting my hands around. We had an AIS (Australian Illawarra Shorthorn) that we named Dolly after the singer. She was generously endowed and had teats like toilet rolls. She could feed her own calf and two others. Now that was a lot of milk!

Now the way not to do things!

When we first started out, I enlisted the aid of an old cocky (farmer). He was a Friesan man through and through and couldn’t understand why I wanted to buy “that jersey”. She was quiet and would just stand there to be milked. This was true, just not in a shed. Put a bucket of dairymeal in front of her and you could milk her anywhere in a paddock. Not great on rainy days! He wanted us to put the calf up for auction at the end of the sale. I asked how old the calf was and he said about a day. My mother’s instinct came to the fore. After giving birth, she was to lose her calf? No fear! We took cow and calf. This was a blessing because if you didn’t want to milk you could leave her with her calf and you didn’t have to worry. Good if you wanted to go away for a couple of days.

However, it was our first cow and the only ones I had seen were at the Royal Show in Sydney. They wore halters and were led around. So I gave Vic a headcollar and told him to put it on. He came back saying he didn’t think she wanted it on as she had tossed her head and him at least three times. She never wore a headstall.

Okay, lets get serious again!

Now as she had only just calved we need to leave her so that the sting went out of the milk. In our area they called this beestings. This can take about 5-7 days.

After that you can start milking your cow. Some come broken in to a head bale, some are not. All our cows used to just stand there munching their dairymeal. We didn’t leg rope them either. Some people tie the leg on the side you are milking back. We have had various cows and all of them have their own little habits. Quite a few would only milk on one side. After being threatened with a kick, I would try the other side to find that suited the cow. One we tied around the neck to start her, as she wasn’t broken in to milk. We didn’t have a bale, so we just tied her up and started milking. She messed up sometimes and put her foot in the bucket of milk but after awhile, she would keep it back. I always felt that it was better to lose a few buckets of milk than leg rope her. Interestingly enough, when we were doing some riding camps, a little lass offered to milk her for me. She was an experienced milker as they had their own cow. I said okay. Next she came back to say that Delilah (we called her that because she was so beautiful) kept putting her back leg up and moving her hands away from the udder. It wasn’t me, so no one else was going to get her milk!

They are all characters and like all animals each an individual with certain preferences.

Happy milking!

“ABOUT THE AUTHORS”: Vic & Rose Rushton are recognised as leading authorities on organic farming. Their web site http://www.rushton-enterprises.com provides a wealth of informative articles and resources on organic farming

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You cannot, not love, a pygmy goat. These highly intelligent beings appeal to all the biological imperatives that make babies and Webster beloved by all–despite their generally appalling behavior, excessive drinking and propensity to dirty diapers–well, Webster could be trained to change his own diapers, I guess, if it weren’t for the excessive drinking. Pygmy goats have the out-sized head and feet, stumpy bodies and incalculable cuteness that flips our inner switches into “protect the baby” mode.

Its reward enough to simply sit, for hours, with a pygmy goat in your lap and stare into their eyes while they regurgitate the ingesta from their rumen and ruminate on it. Sheep and goats produce 10-15 liters of saliva per day to assist in the digestive process; along with 5-10 liters of belched gas an hour. You laugh, but compare this to a cow–these excessively larger animals produce over 100 liters of saliva per day. The lovability spit limit is about 50 liters of saliva per day. Less than this and an animal is cuddly, more than fifty and an animal simply becomes too special to be hugged for extended periods. This saliva limit essentially divides the animal kingdom into pets and table gravy.

Still, these statistical invariants do define the limit of the pygmy’s inherent pet-ness. They consume prodigious quantities of cellulose to drive this belching, spitting engine at maximum efficiency and, somehow, the results of this digestion must come flying out somewhere. Imagine. Just don’t imagine the pygmy goat taking up residence next to you on the couch.

Fortunately their pellets are quite small and quite hard; little round objects that are easily swept off the back deck; not so easily plucked from the shag carpet. They cannot be housetrained because they are proud animals and proud of their output. Dogs will kick grass over their effluent and run away, goats will sleep on it. In fact, male goats urinate on themselves during the mating season as the smell drives the ladies crazy–in a good way.

Also, keep in mind that pygmy goats are prey animals; dogs and cats are predators. This distinction drives much of the goat’s behavior. Goats are Zen-like in their calm alertness, but stoic and controlled in their responses. Their tails wag when they’re happy, like dogs, but once they’ve signaled happiness they return to that state of quiet observation that defines much of their being. They don’t keep wagging the stupid tail for hours on end, constantly demanding that the whole world know they’re the happiest thing ever in the history of happiness and if you’re not quite as happy as they are because you don’t have a real job and your car needs new tires that you can’t really afford, well, they just don’t care. And the damn tail just keeps wagging even when you try to catch it under the rocking chair or stomp on it with your foot. Soooo.

Because goats are prey animals they always try to hide their feelings. Even when you love them so much it hurts and you just want to make a connection, any connection, but they just stare back at you. This prey psychology means that they will not tell you they’re sick until its almost too late. A goat that acts sick is on death’s door. If you’re not really experienced, get them to the vet immediately because you only have a few hours before this beloved pet, who just won’t share their emotions or acknowledge the depth of your feelings, is going to die any minute. Why are you waiting, get the car keys, grab the goat, run for the door, but know; it’s already too late. You tried, but you’ll always have that nagging doubt, did you try hard enough–just like your last marriage. You know it was her fault, but was it really?

Anyway, enjoy your pet. Pygmy goats, like babies, are wonderful.

Steven Grant is the co-author of Meet the Goat Kids and The Goat Kids Explore the Woods. After 25 years of comparatively successful work as a Fortune 500 corporate executive he is now making his living as a writer. “Living” being loosely defined as using up your savings while waiting for the application at 7/11 to be approved. A night job at 7/11 could provide a chance to establish a broad network of potentially lucrative future contacts amongst the working poor, many hours of zero activity (after carefully re-stacking the spoiled food among the unspoiled food) within which to write, perchance to dream, and next month’s rent. Please visit our website at http://www.goatkids.net and buy something or those incredibly cute pygmy goats are going to be schmoo pancakes once we run out of feed. Or visit the website and read something so compelling that you just have to sign me on to do your next screenplay or ghost write your next novel. After all you now have more money than time, just like I used to have, and dammit you know you’d like to stamp your imprimature on the arc of history.

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