Wrapping up Ben's barn for the season

 Last Sunday after a two week break , one of those to nurse my bad back into shape , we made the one hour ride up to Richmond to deck over the second story on Ben's barn.

Since we were there last Ben did manage to get in a couple more uprights in each bay to keep that wet hemlock from sagging too badly .

 

Fortunately  his neighbor had come over earlier with the forklift tines on his Kubota and helped get the plywood on the upper deck saving us a great deal of toil.

 First thing we did is add a couple more knee braces to keep things from wobbling on us .

 

 

Contemplating imminent agony . . . mmm

 

Soon we hit a rhythm and had the first course set to the chalk line

 

Trying to make things fit so it don't go kattywompus on us 

 

 

Nail gun makes for quick going but can cause pain in other places . Just five days ago I could barely stand up or walk and it was only Friday I started to feel marginally mobile again .

 

Forty degrees F made for thick glue and skinny Ben had a hard time making it flow out of the tube .

 

 

Even got Annie in on the work marking out sixteen inch centers on the plywood for us

 

More frozen construction adhesive

Yea if I'd left the glue to Ben we'd still be there a week later .

Running short on gun nails

So we made Ben do it the old fashion way

 By 3:30 pm we got it done

Tarping it over for the winter

Package on the tarp said 24 X 30 feet , must be them smaller Chinese feet as it just barely covered the twenty four foot wide deck .

 

 

That should keep it dry .... mostly

 

 There good enough for now

If he gets some sheathing boards on it he might even have a place to park the cars out of the weather on snow days this winter . We'll do the roof rafters next spring .

More empty shelves than a Venezuelan supermarket

 Stopped by Cabelas on Monday and this was the scene:

For handgun ammo all they had was eight boxes of 25acp. Normally that rack is loaded on both sides.

Shot shell shelf was not much better. Most of that was 28 ga.

Small rifle had some 22 hornet and some other odd balls.

If you are into .50 Beowulf or .450 Bushmaster you might have something.

Building A Barn

Three years ago . . . 

 

I built a 12 X 16 foot tool shed for my friend Benjamin .

 

Then his brother in law built a nice house for him a couple years ago.

He then bought an old Ford 8N , I wonder where he got that idea ?

For which he built a shed . Came out pretty good too considering it was his first solo build .

 

Then last year he got the notion that a barn would be a handy thing to have. So he got some foundation pads and crushed rock laid out , and started pecking away at the sills .

Then he shouldered a bigger challenge .

Which made progress slow to a crawl . Lots of pondering and questions back and forth via e-mail so I figured it was time to make the hour drive up to Richmond and see what all the fuss was about .

Of course just looking it over was not enough so we labored on Labor Day . Spent a couple hours checking it for square and level and tweaking things a bit here and there . Then we did some heavy lifting . Just don't let my spinal surgeon see that .

 That there monstrosity we were moving was one of Ben's creations made out of sopping wet green hemlock . . . .

 . . . in order to make lifting equally wet and heavy hemlock beams into place on top of the posts he had previously installed .

They did work pretty slick once positioned as needed .

Trouble was moving them was a royal PITA but it made lifting the hemlock beams into place a breeze

Took some finessing to get some beams to fight right .

Well , its not like we are building pianos here anyhow

By the end of that day we got all six beams up in place . No small task considering they were probably three hundred pounds a piece .

 He then ordered some much lighter 2 X 8 X 12 kiln dried spruce and made some progress on his own . Built two tripled up beams and got a couple rim joists up . Which only resulted in more questions .

So last Sunday we made the journey back up to Richmond and after some adjustments set about making some headway .

 I'm getting a bit long in the tooth for that sort of monkey business .

But if its gonna get done right . . .

Tripled up , glued and spiked 2 X 8 X 12 KD Spruce headers , so much lighter than that wet hemlock .

Even so , the look on my face says it all .

Its strange but that guy looks frightfully like my own father .

Never mind that . . . . get to work .

And that's right when I smashed my finger into the head of another protruding nail as I was looking into the sun and could only make out the profile of the spike I was trying to drive home .

By two PM we got all six tripled up beams and the rim joists up in place so while Ben went to get us some lunch . . .

Annie and I got thirty two more common joists trimmed to size and ready to be installed .

And that's why I hurt at the end of the day .

Making headway quickly now .

By three thirty we had them all up .

Satisfaction . . . that's enough pain for one day .