Goodbye and good riddance

I love our old barn. I hold great, unspoken hopes for what it may become some day in the fuzzy, distant, uncertain future of this place. In the meantime I enjoy simply looking and daydreaming about it. And photographing it. Lots of photographs. Some of which I've posted before. 

What you may not have noticed is that I've never shown all four sides. There's a reason for that. One side was a mess. A two-story shed across the entire southern side had collapsed in recent years, exposing the hay mow and creating a ruin. An insurance-cancelling, disaster-in-waiting, heap-of-a-wreck.

The cleanup and rehabilitation began today. We didn't get far, because of the rain, but we got far enough to finally show some pictures. More will come with time, but don't anybody hold their breathe.

Before:

Winter 2012-2013

Winter 2012-2013

Spring 2013

Last week, Summer 2013

After:

Today, July23, 2013

Today, July 23, 2013, in the rain

Inside the hay mow, looking out.

The timbers

Ta da.  

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.

Old farm surprises

Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work needed to turn this old farmstead around. So much junk. So many decrepit outbuildings. So much...um...nature.

On a good day (like the day I bought it ;-/  ), I see mostly the potential. On a bad day, I see just the decay.

Some days I feel like I'm making progress. Small, incremental victories. Other days I am sure I can hear mother nature laughing.

So, lately, I've been working hard on a little patio next to the house. Just someplace simple to put a table and chairs, so we can sit outside away from the bugs and the dirt. It's backbreaking work. I'll do a whole post on it when it's done -- soon. Anyway, part of the effort has been spent collecting old bricks from around the property and hauling them to the patio site. About half the bricks came from a pile stacked -- long long ago -- next to the lawnmower shed. There is a cement pad along the south facing, outside wall of this shed that was used by previous owners to cache building and fencing materials like bricks, cement blocks, t-posts, roles of field wire, old kennel panels, and god knows what else. I've been chipping away at it for awhile. If I think I can use some of the materials, I do. I've used a 200 ft roll of woven wire, some t-posts, and now the bricks.

It can be challenging to pull things out of the pile because of the vegetation that has crept in over the years. One vine in particular completely engulfed the pile and the side of the shed last summer to the point that nothing underneath was accessible. The vine reminded me of kudzu -- that invasive vine in the South that swallows whole trees and buildings and anything else that doesn't move. In the fall, when the leaves fell off, I made a half-hearted attempt to hack the vine back so that I could reach things, but some of the vine was inaccessible because of its growth under and behind this huge stack of materials that I hadn't yet started to remove. A catch-22 of sorts. I did the best I could. I cut as many of the main trunk branches as I could reach. Pulled out lots and lots of branches.

Here is the shed two summers ago.

Here it is in March, after I had done much cutting. 

Still, I knew I didn't get it all. 

Here it was when I went out to gather bricks for the patio recently. 

This is what a warm, wet summer will get you. See the resemblance to kudzu? To say I was bummed would be an understatement.

And then I saw this. 

And this.

Holy moly. 

I am positive there was none of this going on last year. 

It never once occurred to me that this might be a grapevine, but a grapevine it is. A huge, beautiful, fully matured, producing grapevine. 

It seems the hacking pruning I did last year, brought it into fruit this year. I have ALWAYS wanted a producing grapevine, but never lived anywhere long enough to pull it off. I've even planted vines in pots and carried them with me from house to house. 

Never have I produced a single grape. 

Until now. 

There are no words to express how thrilled I am about this grapevine. 

So today is day of potential. :)

Archeological dig

Considering how many outbuildings we have on this old farm, we have remarkably little useable storage space. That's because so many of the outbuildings look like this on the inside.

This is a 10 x 20 bay on the south side of the garage barn. You're looking at a solid mass of old construction debris, dating back decades. Farmers never throw anything away. 

I have decided I need the space for animal housing. Long term, probably a big, roomy chicken coop. I'm not liking our current setup, even with the new space in the new barn. So, I will try again. 

First step is to remove the junk. I went to Angies List Monday morning and pulled off the names of haulers. Guys with trucks and the will to do hard, dirty, physical labor. Here's the same space after less than an hour of work Monday evening.

Next step, a floor. I had a concrete guy come out to look Wednesday. While I wait for him to do his magic, I'll start thinking about the walls and some windows.

In the meantime, here's some interesting stuff that came out of the shed. 

Huge 12-15 foot long pallets made from old wood. Somehow, someway, there must be a new use for these.

A tiny bottle from old green glass, that says DO NOT REFILL on the side. Surprisingly the only bottle found among all the junk.
















An elegant old wooden door, with the original knobs and hardware. Wish this were still IN the house.

And most appropriately, old nesting boxes and an old burlap bag for Wayne Feeds Poultry Mixer. Clearly this shed was meant to be a chicken coop!