*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

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

Hello everyone! This is Geoffrey up in Montana, and I was given the honors to write a blog for my bro so he could go out and build his barn.

In case you didn’t know, our family is here in Polson, Montana at the Ashton and Anna Headquarters, but this time the activities were epic! Ranging from barn raising to water skiing, the family has lined up for a week of fun and games in true Montana style, basically.

I created a AshtonAnna header design for this blog, which you can see here:

Here are some photos of some of the activities on the Lake:

Here’s me and Ashton flying around in the tube (also a new header):

This is AshtonAnna’s “I’m on a Boat” picture:
Read the Rest of this Post

A cool thing about our property is that half of it is pretty steep 20+ degrees, and the other half is almost completely flat. This allows for lots of different activities. Well, that melt off that I mentioned in my last post drained down our steep hill and made a small pond in the middle of our “flat pasture.” And the latest cold snap has frozen the pond into a small ice pond.

If you’re interested in more back story: The previous owners lived in our current house for 1 year. The winter that they were here, the father had this great idea of dragging his children behind his vehichle on a tarp. I bet they had a blast, and it ended up killing a lot of the grass in a long strip. So now we have a fairly flat, slightly lower strip of land going through the middle of our pasture. It was this strip that now is home to our frozen puddle.

I think that’s enough details to enjoy our video. Donald and I (Ashton) took our friend’s ATV out into the pasture and had some fun:

Ashton:

Donald:

Here’s the video we made:

Wahoo! What a blast!
-Ashton

We have had 3 to 4 feet of snow fall here in Montana so far this Winter. Right now there is about a foot of snow on the ground. And since I’ve never gone sledding for more than a couple of feet, we went out and hit our neighbor’s hill. Anna purchased a sweet snow tube at the beginning of last summer, and we had some 1 person tubes we used on the river. Here’s Anna and Ashton in our river tube:

We’d estimate that this slope is 300 feet long. Here’s a video of some of the crazy slopes we took:

Then we got tired of hiking that ridiculous hill, so we had Cory pull us behind his old Toyota Land Cruiser.

Happy New Year,
Ashton Anna