Thursday, July 4, 2013

Shed conversion continued

I was so inspired by the barn transformation pulled off over at Squash Blossom Farm, that I spent yesterday morning following suit.

Yeah yeah, our barn is smaller, dirtier, shakier, more rotten, and filled with only a tiny thimbleful of the potential of their barn. I know.

So this is the poor man's version.

Let the sun shine in, I say.

Here's where we started. (Believe it or not, a lot of junk had already been moved out before I thought to take a picture.)


After the clean out.



After removing most of the siding yesterday.












I'm leaning towards replacing the south wall (on the right of pic) and the east wall (straight ahead) with clear acrylic panels. The west wall, where I'm standing to take the picture, faces the house and the street and will be left as is.

In the meantime, a few more challenges were discovered...

Notice the dark, oblong-shaped spot in the middle of the floor above? That's where my foot punched straight through the dirt floor into a huge underground cavern an old animal burrow and I squealed like a little girl. It also explains why the dirt is so uneven in there. I've never seen any openings to this burrow, or any ground-dwelling animals using this barn, so I'm assuming it's long abandoned. The guy doing the concrete will solve this problem when he grades the floor (one hopes.)







There's also a fair amount of decay on the outside of the girders that sat just under the old window openings. Gross. I'll look into some way to clean and preserve the old wood, but it may have to be replaced. The pieces are remarkably strong though and they aren't load bearing, so we'll see. 




Here's the view from the back. When I'm not busy being appalled by my wanton destructiveness, I'm pretty excited. This may turn out too nice for chickens.



2 comments:

  1. You, m'dear, have a project on your hands. But I've never seen a building (no matter what its shape) on a homestead that isn't worth trying to save. Eager to see how this progresses. You go, Girl!

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  2. Oh! A picture window, eh? I wish we had one of those in our barn. But then Ella would probably just butt a whole in it. You go! Can't wait to see the finished project.

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