A couple weekends ago, we started a little project to add a Trakehner Logo to the barn gable. Here’s the progress:

First we had the Trakehner logo printed out on a 36″ tall sheet of paper. Using a razorblade, we cut the design into the wood. We made the cuts visible with a sharpie, and cut the logo out with a jigsaw.

Then Anna painted it and I put it up on the barn:

Here’s a view of the front of our barn now, with the new logo:

We probably could have brought the logo down a little bit, but I think it looks great! You can see in this last picture, the newly-stained wood, and the trim pieces that really put the finishing touches on the barn.

Trakehner Logos Everywhere!

For Christmas, I bought Anna a window sticker for her truck window, and we finally got it completed! It is Anna’s horse-breeding business’s logo accompanied by the Trakehner logo. Here’s a picture:

You can see more about Anna’s horse-breeding business at her Top Priority Trakehners Website.

I hope you all had a wonderful Easter! Anna, Carol and Ashton went for a trail ride and rode through our lake to get to (and from) the trail. It was very fun.

Here’s the mandatory picture of Mocha. Although I have two for you this time because I couldn’t decide which Easter picture was better.

Love,
Ashton + Anna

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

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 2x4s 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”)

Do you see any holes? *SHAZAM* I didn’t think so!

Ashton and Anna are very happy that Ashton lined up all the holes correctly. Here’s the first four pieces of roofing:

Here’s a behind the scenes look inside the construction site. Buddy lent me the scaffolding. What a huge time-saver. You can also see the rest of the West Wall waiting to be put up.

Funny Story:

While we were hammering/screwing in the purlins, Carol’s electric drill (that she’s kindly letting us borrow) fell off the roof. Amazingly the end of the drill’s cord managed to grapple itself onto one of the 2x4s.

It’s kind of tough to see in this picture, but the yellow, DeWalt Drill is hanging from the last purlin by the little rubber strap that holds the drill tightener/loosener… What is that thing called anyway?

Yes, Donald and I reenacted the dropping of the Drill for this photo. =)

The next Day, Mocha helped inspect our roofing job to make sure we had enough nails and screws.

Here’s really the only recent pics I have of the fabulous help we’ve gotten from our friends this week: Donald, Casey and Carol.

Yeay! We completed the Epic Barn Roof! Anna also let the horses in there since it was supposed to rain a lot today. Here’s the horses checking out how the Epic Barn Project is coming along:

Thanks for reading.
AshtonAnna

(Btw. If you put your email address in the top left of the page (to subscribe to our Blog), the system will email you every time we make a new post!)

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

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.

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.

We got those three horizontal boards on top and the three boards directly below them

Labor Day Weekend

Buddy came over in the morning and Donald came over in the afternoon. We worked on it from 10:00 to 7:00 and this is what we got done:

How great is that! It looks like a barn. I realized that building things is one of my favorite hobbies. Hopefully this means most of the calculating and measuring is done… but it doesn’t.

Here’s some more pics for your entertainment:

Haha, good times,
Ashton Anna

(P.S. Special Thanks to Amber and Anna for taking pictures so I could get proof that I do work on this barn. )

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

The deconstruction destroyed 3 of the long poles, so I had to purchase some pressure-treated square ones (under the tarp above).

On the 19th of August, Clayton came out to help get the remaining 6 poles up. It was a long day, but we managed to get them plumed and started filling in all the holes.

Not too bad for a hobby, eh?

Now that we have all the poles in the ground, I borrowed yet another gadget from Buzz. This thing on the left is a laser level on a tripod. Once I got the tripod level and straightened out, I can rotate the laser level around to create a “level mark” on every pole. I just finished doing that today, so now every pole has a pencil mark that is exactly level to the other pencil marks on every other pole.

The mark on the “uphill pole” is 2.5 feet off the ground, and it’s about 4 feet off the ground on the most downhill pole. So the slant of the ground is about 1.5 feet from one end of the barn to the other.

My shortest short pole is 7 feet 2.5 inches above the “level mark.” (My second shortest short pole is 7’6″.)

My shortest long pole  is 10 feet above the “level mark.”. (My second shortest long pole is 10′ 4″, and then 10′ 9″).

I’ll have to cut down all of the poles to be the same length as the shortest pole of their type (to have a level roof).

Here’s the Epic Barn Project as it is today:

I feel like I’ve done the hardest parts, but there is still a lot left to do…
Ashton Anna

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.

Grandpa Joe helped me a lot in getting these 8 poles plum and braced. At one point, I turned around and took a step right into one of the three-foot holes. I fell almost up to my waste and no cuts or bruises. hahaha

Thanks Grandpa Joe!

After that, Grandpa Joe had to go back to Florida. =(

AshtonAnna

On the night of the 29th (just after the last post), Donald came out with his skidster and worked long into the night digging out a level spot of ground for the epic barn project and creating a drainage berm on the hill behind where the barn will be. Thank you Donald!

As you can see from those pictures, we have piles of wood EVERYWHERE! We have finished cleaning up the mess at Buzz’s, and moved all of the materials to around the construction site. Here’s some shots of the endless amounts of wood:

After that (on the 3rd of August), Charlie came over with the Auger and dug 16 holes for us! I gave Geo the camera and he had a hayday for me:

Yeay! for instant holes in the ground. Thank you Charlie!

Good Neighbors and Friends Rule!
Ashton Anna