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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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.

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

After all of Ashton’s Family left, we spent some time catching up on work. We had just gotten 10 poles in the ground, so we spent a week or so filling in the holes, and tamping it down hard. You’d be surprised at how long just these small tasks take.

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