1.29.2012

The Home Stretch

First, let me apologize to the skiers and schoolchildren of the Northeast who have been praying for snow for the last couple months. It's been a pretty lackluster winter as far as all that goes, and I'm sorry. It seems I've out-hoped all you snow lovers out there with my fervent and selfish desire to get the roof on the barn before this winter's first big blizzard. You can have all the snowdays and fresh powder you want as soon as that roof is on there, I swear. Fortunately, we are almost there.

Fin Lifts the Second-to-Last Purlin into Place
Brian Nails It
Last One!

1.03.2012

New Year's Day = New Barn Day

With the help of two Brians and Mother Nature, we got a lot done over the holiday weekend. On New Year's Eve, Fin, Architect Brian, and Neighbor Brian got the purlins in on the southeast and southwest sections of the roof. We spent that evening developing a strategy to get the middle section purlins up. We also made a delicious dinner and made some noise at midnight, of course.








The middle section presented a few challenges: the beams are longer, they had to be lifted from the ground, not the deck of the hayloft, and attaching them would require two people to be 24 feet off the ground with nothing but concrete beneath them. Pretty scary stuff! We devised a system to pull up the beams with ropes. Happily, it worked.