Creative Barn Building 1

The Confusion of the first few Days has begun!

Humble beginnings

    Having Horses and not a Barn is not a conducive way to store Hay and keep the horses safe. It leads to wasted feed and unhappy critters, especially here in Windy Country. The wind will blow the feed into the next county and the snow and rain will destroy what is on the ground. One of the Horses was a Houdini comeback and he got to where he wanted to go no matter how strong I build the fences or how secured I thought he was in the pasture.

   So I got this crazy idea of building a Post and Pole Hayshelter with pallet walls. The idea was to build 4 walls and a roof and use pallets as a wall to keep the hay out of the wind and save from the wet stuff that falls from the sky. I have seen that done and I thought I can do that with just a few dollars for screws and roofing.

   I had no idea how big this will end up to be. As in all my building projects, ideas come and go and most of the time, the project will be a lot bigger then it was originally planned on being.
Thankfully, where we are, we do not have to get permits and building plans for barns and sheds, so I went sort of overboard with the building.

   But first things first.
I started to collect and grab pallets wherever and whenever I had a chance. My local Lumberyard was very helpful and they had been free. They also let me take all the scrap lumber I could get on my truck, for free. Nice people and I can not praise them enough. It is a good idea to keep the Lumberyard Folks happy. Every so often I bring them a box of goodies to enjoy. It does not cost me much to bake and it keeps the guys and girls happy there. The Local ACE store was/is also a good source and so was the Feed Mill/Hardware place. We collected pallets wherever we went and brought them home. Every trip to town ended up with filling the bed of the truck with pallets.




   Over the next two months, the lot I use for firewood, filled up with odd size 2x4's, stacks and stacks of pallets (they do come in different sizes), poles and finally six huge 16-foot tree trunks, courtesy of my firewood guy. I would strongly advise setting plenty of space aside for this purpose. Things that are unloaded helter-skelter and not sorted out can magically disappear and come back when not needed anymore.

   Friends did some dumpster and dump searching and came up with all sorts of goodies that we can use, like windows and doors, siding and shingles that got thrown away, our 2 local dumps had been gold mines for us. We spend many hours collecting.  With the price of lumber, I am not too proud to find most of what I needed and use it.

Here is a very important tip: If you live in Rattlesnake or any other poisonous snake country, I would advise carrying a long and big stick. Stomp the ground with it to let them know you coming and give them time to get away. Listen for the rattle and look, look and look again.

My friends Sharon and Otto are very resourceful in finding these things and having the local Highschool in construction and them throwing a lot of good and usable lumber away, and I mean a lot of usable lumber, we struck pay dirt many times. We also checked out other construction sites and ask what they are throwing away and if it was usable we ask if we could have it. Most times they did let us loaded up because they did not want to cart it off to the dump. Sometimes they even helped us load.

   Slowly my yard filled up and we had to stack things outside the yard.
I believe most of the work was in finding materials and stacking them according to size and usability. After collecting about 2 months, here and there, we thought we are ready to start building. Sorting by size and shape is very important, you really do not want to search for a particular piece in a 5-foot tall stack of lumber. It may seem silly at first and whoever is helping will make fun of you, but come building time, you be happy you did this. My yard looked like a Tornado went through it many times and every evening, we stacked and restacked just to get a grip on the materials we had available.

   Screws and Nails had to be purchased and I did that over the previous 3 months, little by little. On a tight budget, that is not a cheap thing. But we got it done. Every time someone asked me to do something for them and what I would want in return, I told them I wanted a box of screws, nails corner brackets or whatever else they are willing to give. It was a bartering fest at its finest. I bartered for anything that I could use in building this for work or chore runs. I bartered for beadwork and sewing, for baking bread and cooking at gatherings. Whatever came up, I bartered.

                               

  The above pictures are the first tree/corner post that went in and the sort of frame for the door into the pasture. You can also see the four-legged critics that hung around just to make sure we do the right thing.

More in the next post. The construction has started.

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