Tack rooms and tack stores just make me happy. The smell of leather, the sight of neatly hanging bridles and saddles, a grooming box just waiting to shine up your pony…

Our diy tack room was planned out at 10 ft x 11 ft, that size worked well because it allowed the walls to be built out from the existing posts of the barn exterior. The room has a window looking out into the exterior overhang area that we had installed during the barn build. It sits next to the stalls, sharing a wall with the stall next to it.

The floor was framed up right over the gravel floor, with plastic sheeting laid down first to decrease moisture. Then just simple plywood laid down over the frame. I painted the floor once it was installed, and we used some salvaged wood planks for the baseboard.

Then the walls were planked with plywood that we ripped down to 8 inch wide planks from the large plywood sheets. This cut down our the costs but looked a bit better than pieced together large sheets in my opinion. For the wall that faced the stalls (to the left of the window) we used 1 x 6 planks of wood. This wall would hold the saddle racks and needed to be sturdier to hold the weight and since a horse would be on the other side.

The ceiling was framed up simply with joists and 2 x 6’s and then plywood sheets on top.

I whitewashed the planks with some watered down white paint I had on hand, and added some shelves I repurposed from around the house.

I also repurposed some cabinets from my grandparents old home. The tops make a great spot to store supplements and treat containers, and taking off the doors allow easy access to grooming boxes and more storage. I also added a framed picture of every horse we have had stabled in a backyard barn since my first horse.

We added some simple and cheap diy wall saddle racks.

And we made a bridle rack from a repurposed board with mounted screw in bridle holders. To the left of that you can see part of a wire wall mount shoe rack I repurposed after we took it out of our home closet. It actually works great for holding fly masks or leg wraps or sweaty splint boots to dry out.

This shows the overall simple layout of the stall area. We also used scrap wood to create a ladder up to the roof above the tack room to store hay or equipment.