Barn-chitecture

My husband never gets or takes enough credit. So today is his day. When we bought this ex-farm back in 1995, it came with a dairy barn built around 1895. Leaning dangerously it took just a wee push with our truck (we did not even own a tractor then) for it to collapse. With the help of our then 13 year old son, much of the wood was moved to another site and it was indeed BARN-again.

While I was gone most days all day at my nursing job, Keith would piece by piece rebuild the barn so now the inside still contains much of the century old barn covered with new (now 18 years old) steel siding.

A couple days ago I was up walking around the loft (I went up for a bale of hay for the horse and got distracted ) The lighting was beautiful and I noticed again the beauty of the old barn within a new barn.

Getting up into the loft takes some skill, the ability to put one foot in front of the other and pulling one round self through the opening in the floor.

With the old posts and beans my husband also moved over much of the old hardware, some of it I would guess was hand forged back then.

The beams themselves are much thicker than you can ever find now, at least in this sorry country where we tear things down about 20 years and throw away far more than we ever recycle.

 

This old basketball hoop hasn't been used in years not since we built our big machine shed and a new hoop with a concrete court instead of uh..straw and other things.

Looking up you can see the multiple rafters that came from an old chicken barn.

 

 

Keith put each of those in place one at a time with the first tractor we bought, hoisting them up with chains, then climbing up to secure them, then back down to put another in place then back up to secure them. When I think about selling our farm and this barn I get saddest about leaving this barn since literally so much of my husbands blood, sweat and tears is in those beams!

 

The hay loft was full a few months ago but now, mid winter, the supply is dwindling. Our GK's love to come up here to play, to read to build forts (with us of course). What is it about haylofts that kids love so much?

More beams up above Wally and his visiting harem. Seeing them reminds me its time to clean out some cobwebs again, insinuating I do this on a regular basis...yeah, when pigs fly.