We have survived another year in Northern Montana!

To the right, you can see Liana (pregnant Trakehner mare), Anna, Ashton and Maple Pancake in front of our house.

Our ranch is still keeping us very occupied. We planted another 15 baby trees just in case we run out of oxygen. We added 500 feet of underground water pipes to add 4 hydrants all around our property.

The largest project we have done to date was building a new “Epic Barn!” With the help of many great neighbors and friends, we took down and rebuilt this 1000+ sq ft barn! (You can see endless details on our AshtonAnna Blog. )

Anna’s Top Priority Trakehners is doing great. Liana (above) is pregnant (due 2010). They also purchased a new Trakehner named Elbe: an imported mare from Germany. She had a small meeting with Trakhener Breeders from Idaho and Montana, plus a special guest, Dr. Maren Engelhardt, a breeder from Germany.

Anna went for a 3 week apprenticeship with a Trakhner breeding farm in Florida and started showing the first horse she bred: Ossette.

On the nerd front, Ashton found a great group of web programmers in Montana. He has done a few presentations on topics like CSS and Search Engine Optimization. He’s learned a lot and found some more great friends.

Ashton’s Websites in a Flash business is still doing great, starting out the year with a brand new website re-design and another consistent highest-ever income year. The more he learns, the more he realizes that the learning curve for web developers never really ends.

Here’s a collection of my favorite posts from 2009:

Sledding on our neighbor’s hill

ATV 306’s on Ice

First 2009 Spring Grub Club

Epic Barn Project Begins

Digging a Moat around our house

Epic Barn Completed

<3,
Ashton and Anna

I really can’t believe it. Old man winter really gave us a break this year. It’s almost thanksgiving and we don’t have any snow on the ground. We got our first snow months ago, but it didn’t stick long enough to be annoying.

We have completed v1.0 of our Epic Barn! I’m calling it v1.0 because I’m sure we’ll be doing a lot of finishing work on it before it’s really done, but it is dry enough to put hay in!

Okay, here’s the pictures:

Here’s Donald doing his famous leg hold on the barn to get the hard to reach nails:

Here’s the south wall completed, which was pretty much done completely by Donald as I was called off to do a bunch of electrical work…

Honestly, this would not have been done before winter if it weren’t for the Stanfield boys. Donald and Casey did so much on the walls, it was ridiculous.

Nora and Liana have been testing out their new shelter and, so far, are really enjoying it.

Finally, we completed the North wall!

And what’s a blog post without Mocha? (This first pic is my new dual-screen desktop image.)

Mocha has learned how to climb up and down ladders and scaffolding. If we leave a ladder leaned up against a pole, she’ll climb up and walk around on the rafters.  I still have no idea how she got up the scaffolding…

We have started filling up our new barn with hay for the horses. Here is what two tons of hay looks like in our epic barn:

(You can see the horses on the far right of this pic. And since we were going to be stacking hay all the way up to the horses, we built a little wall to keep the nosy out of the hay stack.)

Here is 4 more tons of hay that has since been re-stacked in our barn and you can see the wall we built on the right side of the pic:

Before I sign off, I’d like to make a thank you list of all the people who helped us build this epic barn:

Buzz and Connie
Donald
Grampa Joe
Buddy and Carol
Charlie
David
Marcy
Geoffrey
Casey
Clayton
Bryon
Johnny
Beau

THANK YOU!

Ashton and Anna

Well, I think we can finally say it’s all down hill from here.

When I started on this Epic Barn Project, I thought getting the poles all straight and perfectly placed was the hardest part of this barn. Then when I go to the roof, I thought that was the hardest part (as I’ll explain below). Now that we have completed those two difficult tasks, we only have walls left. These walls consist of 2×12 boards nailed vertically to the “cross beams”.  Thankfully that doesn’t take a lot of thinking, measuring or calculating to make sure it’s absolutely perfect. We may run into a couple difficult spots (where the rafters come out of the wall for example), but I think it will be easy peasy lemon squeezy compared with trying to calculate where all the roof purlins go… explained below.

Putting up the Second 1/2 Roof

Pretty much all of the material we are using for the Epic Barn Project (including the tin roof) came from our neighbor’s barn. It was just as cool as my barn, but I don’t call it an epic barn because I didn’t build it .

Since the roof tin has already been used on a barn, all of the screw holes have already been drilled through the tin. We got very lucky on this first roof because most of the holes were the same distances from each other and lined up with the purlins (wooden 2×4s we screw the roof to). There was only one small area where the purlins and holes didn’t line up.

Unfortunately, the other roof was very sloppy. The holes were all over the place because the old purlins were not perfectly lined up. Even the length of the roofing varied by up to 5 inches!

In this picture you can see that the holes on the top line up with each other, but the length of the tin extends much farther and the second set of holes (bottom) don’t match up either.

So I had to measure every roof tin, put the measurements into excel and put them all in the proper order. Then I had to calculate where the purlins would have to go to match up with all of the holes. Here’s the first half of the purlins: (You can also see the progress on the “West Gable”)
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*It is late so please excuse my especially horrible spelling.*

After not working on the epic barn project for 20 days, old man winter peaked his head up just to remind me what’s coming. It snowed a few inches in a night on October 9th… Last year we had snow on June 12th. Someone please tell global warming to hurry up, geeze.

This Epic Barn Project won’t be of much help to anyone without a roof… especially if this winter trend keeps up.

First things first: I called my good neighbor Buzz down for some quality construction advice and so he could chainsaw down the excess top of the support poles.

Buzz really let them have it.

(Special Thanks to Buddy for letting me borrow the scaffolding. What a live saver!)
But just after this picture, we hit a ringshank nail and it popped the chain of the blade. =( Buzz let me borrow his brand new DeWalt Saws-all so I could chop down the remaining ones.

During and after we were cutting these poles, I was also working on scabbing the tops of the rafters (where they came together) for some extra support. (The old barn was only toe-nailed together.)

After that it was time to get some purlins. I started trying to salvage the old (real) 2×4 purlins from the old barn but realized it would take forever to try to patch them all together to make 32 feet 11 times. I also only had enough for 6-7 rows of purlins. So I broke down and purchased some fresh 16-foot 2×4’s.

I started putting them up on the roof (Thanks Anna for passing them all up to me =)), and Mocha came to help, or just be moral support. Please ignore the pink ear-warmer, it was cold and I couldn’t find my black one.

Here’s me after I completed putting up the purlins (hopefully they will line up with the screw holes in the old roofing.)

Before I put the roofing on, I wanted to make sure to get the collar beams at least in place. Anna, Mocha and I got all of these up in a couple hours. (Collar beans are the eight short dark horizontal beams below.)

Although you can’t really see the roof from this angle, I now have 4/16 metal roof tiles screwed down.

So close and so epically far away…
Ashton

As a kid, I’ve always dreamed of doing crazy-awesome things like building a treehouse, slaying an evil dragon or digging a moat around my house. I’ve tried (semi-successfully) to do the first, but finally found a big enough shovel to do the last! (I’m still searching the interwebz for that evil dragon )

Another fantastic neighbor, Sam Doble, had an untamed, 3-year-old, large Tenesee Walker (horse) that needed training. He also had an excavator. You can see both in this picture (on the right).

Sam started digging early on October 3rd, 2009.

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