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.

The “Sanders 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

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

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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After all of that Construction Preparation, we have finally broken ground!

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:

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