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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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

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

Hi All,

Here’s a picture diary with some notes of when my family came to visit this year! We had a great time.

One of the many projects everyone worked on was putting up the fence around the “foal paddock.” Everyone pitched in and worked hard. It cam out looking beautiful. Grandpa Joe even took time to help spread the weeds. =) (Just kidding, he worked on it more than anyone else.)

Here’s some family photos:
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As I’ve mentioned before, this is going to be a “pole barn” which means the entire structure relies on poles sticking into the ground. This epic barn will have (and had) 16 poles. We dug 16 holes, and now we have got to fill them.

8/4/2009: Bryon Harrison helped a lot in this stage. He lined up the poles with the appropriate holes:

Here’s the first four corner poles up and braced. (If I could do this again, I would have measured these corner poles to make sure they were placed perfectly (and square), plum them out and then fill them in.)

8/5/2009: Then we started bracing up the inside poles. Once they are all plum and centered, we braced them with the old purlins. Read the Rest of this Post