For those of you waiting with bated breath for another blog entry, sorry, you've already passed out, gasped and revived and then repeated this process over and over for days, weeks and months. Well...wait no longer and breathe easy. We're back!!!
The biggest reason we haven't updated you about things is, well okay, the many reasons are, we had a disappointing output from the garden (too much rain, weeds, etc. so we didn't want to blog about that), we have been very busy and when we haven't been busy we've just plain been lazy or have forgotten. There...we've admitted it. But now we have progress to report. Back in January one of the
to-do items on our list for this year was to clean out the little barn and add a greenhouse on the back. The barn is fairly clean so the addition of the greenhouse has begun.
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| Before |
Let us set some expectations for you. First, there is still no "greenhouse"...yet, but we're starting on it. Phase One involved raising the roof (this joke never gets old). Actually the side roof over the open side of the barn.
The span that needed to be raised was around 42 feet long. Some of the wood joists are rotten in places. This was going to require very fragile handling. After sitting down and going over a lot of algebraic equations, some geometry, in-depth engineering, architectural drawings and just plain old gut instinct I figured out how to do this very delicately. Just lift that baby with my trusty tractor bucket like a boss.
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| Nothing a little brute force can't handle. |
With boards and metal creaking and groaning, I lifted a corner of the roof. To my surprise, the posts lifted out of their holes and very little was bent out of place. This looked like it was going to be easy.
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| Another benefit of the tractor is ensuring that the structure isn't going to collapse on your head while working. |
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| First span in place. |
As mentioned, the entire length of the roof to be raised was around 42 feet. So my plan was to do 2 - 10' sections first, then 3 - 8' sections to finish off (that's 44', I know. More on that later). The larger sections will comprise the greenhouse portion of the barn, the other sections are wide enough for me to back the tractor in and drop my implements such as my tiller or bush hog (more on that later too).
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| The second 10' span is in place. |
As most of the holes I needed were already there from previous posts which ended up being in about the same places I needed them, I didn't use the post-hole digger on the tractor and opted for digging them with a shovel. Luckily I was pretty close to the right depth with each hole I dug as well, only having to make small adjustments to get my top pieces level.
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| The third span! Two left to go! |
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| Oops! Sometimes the wood on the rafters didn't hold up to the lifting. |
As I went along from span to span I was worried that the metal sheets on the roof would separate, but other than a small spot at the edge between the first two spans, everything stayed intact. The last two spans were the easiest of all and only required one lift with the tractor.
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I just looks so much cleaner and open. Once I put windows
in that side of the barn it will be a lot brighter inside. |
So about having 44' of boards for a 42' span. I'll just cut that off. Or maybe Neta will want to use it to hang something on, like a hanging basket. Who knows?
Remember that I mentioned backing the tractor under to keep my implements there? I'd already been doing that, but could only go so far because the roll bar on the tractor hit the edge of the roof. So by raising the roof higher and having 8' of clearance under that support beam solves that issue, right? Not exactly.
The barn isn't built on even ground. The left side (south end) where the greenhouse is going to go has 96 - 98 inches of clearance, the tractor roll bar is at 95 inches. Keep in mind that my support beams are level. However, the further to the right (north) you go the higher the ground gets. At the far right side I've only got about 84 inches of clearance.I can back into the middle spot, but not the next one. DOH!!! I might have to do some digging and leveling. We'll see.
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| The finished product...as new posts and supports go. On to framing out the greenhouse! |
That's all for now. We'll update you as we begin to build out the greenhouse.
