• Thursday, September 17th, 2009
I can’t believe it’s been a month since I last posted an update, so here goes:
*I decided to post this for the day it actually happened, on Sept 17.*
Mid September Buddy came over to help measure and attach some support “things” for the other rafters that won’t be attached to the main support poles. Yea… I don’t really have a good name for them. They hold the rafters in place until we can get the purlins on.
On the 17th of September, Donald, Johnnie and I got up the remaining 8 rafters. For being so simple it was really tough. You can see Donald and Johnnie working away in this image, while I take pictures =) :

I didn’t get a picture of Donald, but I did get a pic of Mocha and Johnnie helping out on the construction site:

That was a very productive couple hours.

• Monday, September 07th, 2009
On the 2nd of September, we got the front cross beams up. You can see in the below picture that we’ve got all of the main outside walls up. (The back side will be mostly open for horses.)

Here’s a picture of a truck and trailer in the barn so you can get a feel for how large this barn is: (We used the trailer as scafolding.)

We had a barn raising party on the 4th, but only Donald came over. =( It ended up being perfect anyway. We spent about three hours on the North side of the epic barn and got 6 more boards up. It’s really amazing that we can get so little done in so much time… but I guess that’s all part of the learning curve. Read the Rest of this Post
• Tuesday, September 01st, 2009
It’s been another crazy week. Anna’s family came to visit and work as been keeping me busy.
Clayton came over for a few hours yesterday and a couple hours today to help put up the cross braces. After a couple “planning failures” and taking out some tough nails, we got a pretty good hang of it.
This pole barn is extremely simple. There are three horizontal cross-braces between each pole and then we’ll nail boards vertically to them to create the wall. Here’s the first side of the barn we got the braces on:

That was what we got done yesterday in almost 4 hours.
Today, we got the other short wall done in under 2 hours. We had one measurement failure that caused some of the middle boards to not be perfectly horizontal. Anna and I managed to fix it after the pictures were taken.

Here’s what the epic barn project looks like now:

So far, everything is going as planned. Tomorrow Bryon will be coming over to give me s hand getting the other braces up.
-Enjoy,
Ashton Anna