Thanksgiving Weekend fun!

Another great weekend working on the barn only this weekend , on Sunday, we took a day to relax and give thanks and to eat lots of turkey and stuffing and pie.  Our daughter came home for the weekend from university which was totally awesome!!!  She has been so busy this year with school and work and volunteering that she has barely had time to chat so we had a great family get together, just the 4 of us.  We didn't travel to attend Thankgiving dinner with the rest of my family this year in order that we could continue with our favorite hobby....yes you got it.....barn demolition.  What else?  This weekend's work started out in a rather disheartening fashion because we had to tear off the three roof sections that were hanging over the straw bales, in order to clean them up.  Let me tell you these roof sections are a lot bigger once you get them on the ground and it was depressing  to feel like we were starting over with a huge mess.  Then to make matters worse we pulled down the remaining posts and beams that were standing over the straw.  Not a pretty site.  By the end of the weekend though we had everything cleaned up save for a few pieces of roof boards on the straw that we didn't have time to finish.

CAT up on the straw...you can see the beams that had to be pulled down as well as the barn wall behind him.  It gives you some scale to see how large the bales are.

CAT on bales again - he said it reminded him of being a kid

Here you can see the large roof sections that had to be pulled down.  They are seemingly ready to fall onto my sons head......but don't worry...it's an optical illusion.

This is the old drive shed which is next on our agenda before we actually start on our little barn.  Some large pieces of barn board were calling our name and we took a break from collapsed barn clean up to salvage a few of those "money" pieces.  You will hear and see more about this structure next weekend.

This photo is taken from the other side of the barn.  This side was all treed but the farmer has been busy removing the trees.  I think maybe seeing what has been done to date has motivated him to get in on the action.  They are planning on tile draining and planting this field down the road once the barns are removed.

All cleaned up again only now the roof sections are gone as are the posts and beams and the lone remaining barn wall.

A closer look at all our hard work.  It's so clean.  Hard to believe that a 40' x 60' (approx.) barn was once collapsed on this site

A look at our growing lumber pile back at our property.  These are the pieces that we have been able to fit in the trailer - the big pile of lumber CAT is standing beside is barn board.  I would say this has been a great haul so far.

And of course these are the large posts and beams that are waiting to be picked up by the logging truck.  We have this pile as well as the original pile that we have added more to as well.  It is hard to judge scale in this photo but the hand hewn square beam in the front is approx. 1' x 1' x 30'.  These pieces can be milled and turned into flooring, furniture or just used as decorative beams.  We will have to see what they become.

More barn demo pics

Another weekend hard at it on our barn demo/cleanup and we accomplished quite a bit.  We purchased a couple of burn barrels to clean up the small rotted and broken pieces of the barn rather than hauling them off to pay an arm and a leg to take them to the landfill.  We are removing (and hoping to use) everything from the property other than these small pieces.  On Sunday we started working on the roof that just has old cedar shingles on it and the shingles burn readily and are cleaned up easily this way.  Also, the burn barrel catches any nails so I don't have to remove them and they can be screened out later. 

One of our burn barrels

A view of the pile on Sunday morning.  CAT and I had removed the last of the metal roof on Saturday.

When I was walking around Sunday morning taking pictures I noticed a fox running over the straw and heading toward our barn.  He was too fast for me to take a pic.  There are a few large holes inside our barn and CAT figured it was a fox hole and as usual it appears he was correct.  I must say I feel a bit sad about removing the roof over his head.  He has quite the home right now but it wont be there long.  Sorry little fox!   

We found this neat little plant stand under one of the roof pieces.  I am going to sand it and paint it and put it in my potting shed or somewhere to remind me of our barn demo fun.  It is amazing it did not rot.  How about yellow!

A little treasure found buried under the collapsed barn!

Now that is clean if I do say so myself.

Here is a pic taken from the usual spot...the sun was causing some problems with the picture but I will not complain.

This is our second post and beam pile.  You can see the big old beauty barn in the background that is being removed by a crew this week.

We found out on Saturday that the big old beauty is being removed this week by a crew. It may be completely gone by the time we go back this weekend. I must say I am sad since I had been hoping that we would have the gumption to do it too, once we gained our confidence on the small one but with just working weekends and by hand it is better we stick to the original plan. We are going to have oodles of material to use to construct a good potting shed, chicken coop and who knows what else so best not to be too greedy lol. Well that is it for another week. Your comments are encouraged and welcome. Cheers!

My Old Garden

My beloved William Baffin Explorer Rose (affectionately known as Willie) climbing my old arbour.  I am hoping to have a Pergola someday on our new property covered in climbing roses.  Fingers crossed.

I figured it was time to talk about something other than our barn demo and our cedar rails and I thought it would be a good time to put on some pics that would show you another of my passions.  It is hard to look at these pictures now because my garden is really the only thing I miss about our house we sold, in order to follow our dream of living in the country.  Our old neighbour was in the office where I work yesterday and after a chat with him I got to missing my garden and wondering how it is making out under another's hand.   My husband and I started this garden from scratch and built it over about a 5 year period.  Living in town we were blessed with a good size lot that enabled us to fence off the back 60 feet in order to keep the dogs in the dog yard and my garden safe from trompling paws.  I'm just going to upload the photos in no particular order as I've been having a hec of a time with Blogspot(the blog software) and uploading pics.  I'm including shots from early summer and late summer so you can see some of the different flowers I had.



Early summer in my garden

 

Another early summer shot.  You can see the Astilbe plants in the foreground.

You can see the paths in this one.  The flower beds are supposed to be shaped like a pinwheel although I doubt from an arial view they would have been very correct.

My raised vegie beds.  I loved these beds that CAT built for me from one of his co-workers own cedar.  Our new vegie garden will be much larger than this one was ( I already have started planning).  We had so much shade in our old garden that it never thrived the way a garden will in full sun.  I'm looking forward to full sun gardening.

My father took this photo, after we listed the house I believe, toward the end of last summer.



 


This is the view from the garden looking back toward our old house(this is what we used to call the "dog yard" lol but it was really just our lawn.  You can see my little greenhouse on the left.



My little patio.  My husband and I purchased the bricks as seconds from a local company going out of business.  They cost us next to nothing and we spaced them far apart so the moss would take over.  In early summer the bleeding hearts were covered with blooms as were the Sweet Woodroffe.  It is looking a bit "green" in this photo

Well, these are just a few shots of our old garden. I know we will never have one quite the same again but with my 5 acres I have so many dreams and plans and oodles of space to start a new gardening adventure and I'm gnawing at the bit to get started. I just recently purchased a bunch of tarps on sale for next to nothing in order to kill off the grass in my vegie area. I am just going to lay them down, throw rocks on top (which we have in abundance if you read my blog about our fenceline) and kill the grass underneath. This will leave all the roots as nutrients for my soil but not any grass/clover alive to take over my garden. I'm hoping to give it a turn next summer while we are building and amend it accordingly and then the following summer I will be ready to plant. Again, fingers crossed and here's to hoping all goes well. Please feel free to comment by clicking on the word comment at the bottom of this post. Cheers!

Barn Demo Progress Report

We had another great weekend tearing down, or should I say cleaning up the old collapsed barn.  CAT took a vacation day during the week to go pick up our last load of cedar rails for our fence, so this enabled us to have two full days at the barn, one of which included our favorite cheap labour (our son).  I have to say that this type of work, outside in the fresh air, removing nails out of board after board and piling them in the trailer, is so great for your sense of well being (although a bit hard on the body I admit). 


CAT cutting down the trees around the last section of barn



We started the day on Saturday by removing the trees around the last sections of collapsed roof. Once the trees were gone I was able to take a pic of that section that shows a few trees holding up not only the side of the old barn but also the roof.  Very scary. 

A view of the underside of roof section being held up by trees.

CAT, yet again, went right at the metal roof which is very difficult to get off in spite of the age of the barn. You can see the pile of boards at the end of the roof line which are my job to move to the trailer and de-nail and also the one piece of metal roof which I should be moving to the metal pile. (I was just taking a little photo op break)

CAT removing pieces of metal roofing

This is what the site looked like by the end of Saturday.  It was just CAT and I on Saturday so we were happy with what we managed to do.

The site at the end of Saturday

And this is what the site looked like by the end of Sunday. You can now see the neighbour's farm in the background and everything from that side of the barn is on the ground except for a small section of the roof which we have to piece down because it is caught on the tree underneath. I'm not sure if you can see it from these photos but there was one section of post and beam on the right that was on quite a lean there and we now have that ground level which has made a huge difference visually and also for safety.  I can't wait to get out there next weekend to do more. I'm an addict. I'm also showing a pic of our beam pile which is growing steadily. These are big beams that are too long to fit in the trailer.  Stay tuned for more updates.  I hope these barn posts aren't getting too repetitive for you all.  I welcome any comments in the comment section.

The site at the end of Sunday

Our ever expanding post and beam pile waiting for the logging truck to come pick it up

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

The first baby steps of taking down our barn

Before starting the dismantling

After most of the trees are removed

Removing the metal roof from the collapsed barn beside ours

After having removed the barn board

Not a huge load for our first day of dismantling

Here are some pics of our first day on the barn dismantling. You can see how we progressed from first clearing the trees in the front to starting the dismantling of the barn that has already collapsed beside ours. We are keeping the barnboard/posts/beams from this fallen barn as well for future builds and to replace old or problematic pieces on our little barn. We may even be able to salvage some of the old tin roof for our chicken house but we will have to see. Some of it was so tough to get off that we ended up bending it quite badly.  You can see from the last pic that we didn't get a huge amount of board from our first day but a lot of time was spent removing trees and getting used to removing the steel roof.  We are hoping our next day will reward us with a nice full load of lumber in the trailer but rain is expected so it may not be for a few days.