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11/09/2009: "Saving The Barn, Part Three"

As the crop season has wound down, I have found myself thinking about the buildings and other infrastructure. Not that late fall and winter is the best time to work outdoors on buildings, but you get what you get sometimes. In particular I've been worried about the barn. You may recall that I've done some bracing of things in the barn to try and arrest the (literally) downhill slide of the barn. I should go back and look at old pictures, but it seems to me that some things are visibly getting worse since last I paid attention to them. Like the foundation; one crack on the south wall appears to be getting wider. That is how I found myself recently standing in the rain, with a 32 foot ladder, contemplating how to install guttering on the two story barn. The shot above shows the results of a my trip to Home Depot prior to the commencement of festivities.

Perhaps I should back up a little bit. I've been getting contractor estimates on the barn repair, specifically replacing the foundation. Those have kind of been all over the map, from a low of $27k (hmm, what isn't included in that) to $80k (yikes, who has that kind of money?). One guy that I like, Mike Morch, came by and seemed to be pretty straight with me: anything can be saved. It won't be cheap. Is it worth saving? I had been throwing around a figure of $20k to spend to stabilize the barn... maybe not fix it totally, but perhaps fix the worst problem. Mike told me that he honestly didn't think that $20k would buy any time. You could fix one corner or one wall of the foundation, but then one of the other three will get a promotion to Number One Problem.

While I think about that weighty question (is it worth saving?) I still feel compelled to try and do something to at least slow down the inevitable. Gutters would help; water cascades off the roof and lands on the ground next to the foundation. Re-shaping the ground would definitely help - the ground on the south and east sides of the barn slopes toward the barn, and is it any wonder that the south and east walls are the most cracked?

It was a short Friday workday, however, so I wasn't going to fix anything substantial in one afternoon. I had to settle for painting the fascia boards that the gutter will attach to, and digging an emergency ditch to arrest water from reaching the foundation from the south. I initially started digging a trench with a hand shovel, but that was going nowhere. The ground is hard, and filled with roots. Time for the back hoe!

I got the backhoe mounted on the tractor in reasonable time, less than half an hour. Lou turned off the electric fence, and I found a way to access that side of the barn by driving down through the pasture. The seasonal creek was still dry, and I was able to drive across it and up to the barn. Once there, I turned it around so as to get the back hoe pointed in the direction of the work, and started inching up the slope in first gear. Despite the slippery ground, the tractor was able to climb the 30 degree slope. More importantly, the brakes held for me when I had it in position, and wanted to switch seats to operate the back hoe.

Boy, was I rusty with the controls. That's what happens when you set the tool aside for a half year, I guess. Eventually I was working with something that approximated coordination, and I set to work digging the shallow trench and piling the dirt against the wall of the foundation (to create a slope that would run water into the trench and away from the barn.

Net result, shot with camera at twilight with hand held one second exposure:



I still go to bed thinking, "Is it worth saving?" though. More thoughts on that another time.