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.

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!

I see sunflowers

This is the long view from our back window. Three old farm buildings. The large one in the back is the big barn. I have optimistic plans for renovating it in the next few years. The red one on the right is the mower shed. It's in useable condition, though I'd like to use it for something other than the lawn mower some day. It has a great southern exposure which I'm sure is lost on the mower. Finally, on the left is a very old animal barn. The roof is bad, filled with holes, and the timbers inside, once beautiful, are pretty much rotted out. It has to go. Not this year though. It's not high enough on the priority list.

Truthfully, I've also grown a bit fond of its simple weathered lines out my window. A lovely walnut grove shades it on the left, but the righthand side sits in unobstructed sun all day long. 

It's too far from a water source for a serious garden and too doomed to demolition to invest much effort in, but wouldn't it look great with a row of sunflowers against that southern wall? The last couple of years, we haven't been settled enough to do much planting in the spring, but ever hopeful, I've bought seeds anyway. They've piled up. Time to clean out that drawer. Like I said, I'm not willing to invest much time or effort here, but it didn't take me much to dig a little trench along the old foundation line and drop in the seeds from four different packs of 12 foot sunflower seeds. Some were a couple of years old, so we'll have to see what comes of them. I have no plans to weed, thin, or even do much in the way of watering. Hope it rains.  

Old farm, old stuff

  

Linking to Friday Fences

Fences

One of our old barnyard fences.















Connecting to Friday Fences #78.

Is it spring yet?

I still haven't gotten used to the topsy-turvey nature of winter in the Midwest, but I am happy to report that we are not facing THIS, this lovely February morning. This picture was taken almost exactly four

And then the skunk died...

RIP little guy.

A bit of a stink

We're in a bit of a bind here at Tyche's Run.

A few days ago --3 to be exact, and it turns out to matter -- I stumbled on this creature wandering around the back field. A hawk flew away as I approached.

At first I thought it was a cat, but, um, obviously not. I had my new camera with me, so it seemed a good chance to take shots I wouldn't normally get, else I might have just steered clear and not thought any more about it. As it was, the more I watched, the more concerned I became. My first thought was that it suffered lingering shock from a hawk attack, and that if left unmolested, it would recover and run off into the brush. In fact, while I watched, its breathing slowed and it started to move around. But I watched for close to an hour and it never ran off, just wandered listlessly around in circles. Periodically it would stop, curl up in a ball and rest. Rabies? Distemper? Maybe starving to death?