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Epic Barn Project Ranch Snow

Epic Barn Roof

*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 chops down the epic barn

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Ashton Anna Ranch

Digging a Moat

Digging a moatAs 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.

Digging a moat

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Epic Barn Project Ranch

Epic Barn increases Epicness

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.*

Support thingsMid 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 =) :

Support things

I didn’t get a picture of Donald, but I did get a pic of Mocha and Johnnie helping out on the construction site:
Support things
That was a very productive couple hours.
Support things

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Ashton Anna Epic Barn Project Ranch

It looks like a Barn!

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.)

Work on the Epic Barn on September 2

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.)
Truck and trailer in the barn

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.

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Ashton Anna Epic Barn Project Ranch

Epic Barn Project: Walls are going up

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:
First barn wall up
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.
second barn wall up

Here’s what the epic barn project looks like now:
Ashton Anna's Epic Barn Project

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