Old McDonald Had A Barn...And It All Came Tumbling Down

We had a fabulous day on Saturday working on the barn demo.  Our 16 year old son came to help out for the day after a little persuasion and he was a fabulous worker.  He has agreed to come back to help some more in the future between his shifts at his part time job, so we are looking forward to that.  Here he takes a break to catch up on some texting.  You will note our load of barn board is looking much better today as we really got in the swing of things with the demo.  I managed to convince CAT that we should be hooking on and pulling everything down to ground level to work on it and we gave that a try and it made a huge difference on how quickly we were able to disassemble, transfer to the trailer and my job was de-nailing and loading all the light pieces.  It was so exciting pulling down the large chunks with our jeep.  I cheered each time like a crazy person. lol  

You can now see all the old straw that has been laying under the collapsed roof and the next pic will show that piece of roof section on the right, once it's been pulled down, and the large beam has been moved to the pile.  We are hoping the farmer will come and move the straw this week so we can really go at all the barn board that is still standing next to our little barn.

These are the large timbers that we are collecting that will need to be picked up by the logging truck. CAT just hooks onto them with the jeep and then pulls them out.  It's hard to tell from the pic but they are quite large pieces.

While we were working away the farmer that owns the barns came to do a little manure spreading on the field near us. I just had to upload this photo for my brother in law.

We had another successful "Quest for the Holy Rail" on Sunday although we did get a flat tire on the jeep.  CAT had it changed in no time though, without one swear word (remember the last flat tire CAT changed on a jeep Mom and Dad, at the north end of Haida Gwaii?) and after eating lunch we were on our way.  We knew it would be 3 loads of rails in total so this one was not quite as large as last week, and it handled a lot better according to CAT. You can see in the second pic, how large our piles are getting and I'm sure CAT would be hard at fence building if it weren't for a barn that needed moving.

Load number two

The piles are getting bigger!

The Quest for the Holy Rail

A while back before we owned our property I found an ad on Kijiji (like Craigs list) for some old split cedar rails for cedar rail fencing. We want to have this type of fence around the residential side of our property since it will just be to delineate property lines and not to contain animals.  I love the look of a cedar rail fence not to mention it makes a fantastic backdrop for flowers like Black Eyed Susans and Purple Coneflower, old shrub type Roses and on and on.  Anyway, at first CAT was unsure about the distance we had to travel to get these particular rails (approx. 2 1/2 hours away) but the price convinced him it was worth a try and so we set off Sunday morning on our quest.   We made it without an issue and put on our first load of rails.

We had been hoping to do it in two trips but we soon realized they were so large and perfect that it would take three trips to get them all.  We are planning to take advantage of rain days when we are unable to work on the barn, to go get our other loads.  We went slow and steady to test the load and situation and before getting on the highway we stopped to double check the tie downs.   They seemed just fine and I thought I would snap a quick pic of CAT's beloved trailer.  You can see the jeep is showing the weight a little bit.

It took us about 3 hours (with a dinner stop) to get to our property and then as CAT unloaded rails he sorted them into top, bench (middle) and bottom rails as well as a pile for posts.  I had the very important job of keeping the tally.  I have to say it was a much more enjoyable job then handing the posts to CAT when we were loading them. lol

A view of our three piles with the top rails on the left then the bench and the bottom rails at the back right

A closer look at the bench and bottom rail piles




Tops on the right and smaller rails on the left to use as posts

  We had a great day and were blessed by a gorgeous evening and sunset on the property. This pic doesn't do it justice but it was so pretty. Every cloud, even the ones overhead were pink at one point with the dark blue sky in between. It was so picturesque.  The first stage of the quest was a complete success.  Stay tuned to see how stage 2 and 3 go. And of course the actual building of the fence.

Sunset on Scotch Bush Farm