Building Barns

For the last two weeks Mitch and I have been working on restoring the roof to a barn near Genesee Idaho.  For both of us it has been a learning project, especially since neither of us have much experience with construction.  The barn was originally built in the early 1900's as a Timber Frame Barn, and over the years has had various improvements to keep it up and running.  Last November, however, during a large wind storm the front doors and one whole side of the roof were blown away,  some of it traveling over 500 yards before crashing down in the fields.  I imagine it must have looked and felt a lot like the movie the Wizard of Oz when those doors crashed in and caused the roof to lift off.

Due to the extent of the damage the owner couldn't find any contractors to come fix it and instead had to set to the task himself.  Being a brick layer by trade he had quite a bit of experience in construction, but still needed the manual power to lift beams, hammer nails and read measuring tape.  Thus Mitch and I found ourselves a third job to occupy our time.
We began laying the rafters for the roof which we put on 16in. centers (means the distance from the center of one rafter to the next was 16in.),

this was probably the most stressful part of the build since not every beam was straight and many had large bows in the middle. we still needed to get the rafter ends lined up at the right distances, so in order to do that we had to add spacer blocks that were cut to size.  This added a lot more work as each spacer block needed to be knocked into place and than nailed down along with the rafter beams.  Needless to say I was all kinds of sore after the first day.  Hammering nails makes you sore in ways you didn't think you could be sore.  It made me feel like I had broken my wrist with the pain it gave me, and the clicking of my wrist wasn't to reassuring.  Not to mention the way the fingers in my left hand (left handed so I swung the hammer with my left) swelled up and got stiff.  Luckily this was only a temporary side affect and by then next day I was back in shape to hammer away at some more beams.  After two days of hammering nails we had put over 1000 into the rafters and their accompanying spacers which leads me to believe that in the next big storm the whole barn will have to collapse before the roof will fall apart.

We were unable to see the completion of the barn before we left Moscow, but we did get to spend one day roofing which is a whole new experience.  Each of the thirty plus sheets of plywood we used on the roof had to be lifted from the ground, up through the rafters and than stacked so that it could be later slid  into position and nailed.  Some times when you are lifting the plywood you might be the only one holding it, while you balance precariously on the rafters and plywood that is already laid.  Whenever I found myself in that position I just prayed that a strong wind didn't come up and blow the sheet off the roof, with me attached to it.

At the end of the day we left the barn with a new appreciation for roofers.  After standing for a few hours on the 30 deg slant of the roof and hammering in plywood sheets, our ankles were killing us.  I can't imagine how people can do that for a living.  Walking on roofs at least as steep as the one we were working on day after day, and still having the ability to walk around town without a limp.

The other attraction out on the farm was an old wood grain silo built near the barn.  The silo was built quite a long time ago and still had all of the old wood cogs and leather belts to run it.  It was sure something to look at and explore.  One of the most amazing things  I found about it was the construction style used to build the holding bins.  Each bin was built with 2x4's laid upon each other creating walls that were 4in. thick and very tightly sealed.  I can't imagine the price that it would have cost to obtain and than use that much timber to construct the silo, but it seems to have been a good design since the grain silo survived the wind storm in November without a scratch while the barn lost half its roof.