Trim completed, we started shingling the back half of the roof….. and if you know anything about the baby barn?
You know it wasn’t going to cooperate.
Oh, the first row was perfectly level.
Unfortunately…. it was also 5/8ths of an inch short.
If you’ve ever done roofing, you know what a nightmare this is. Tiny little strips of shingles had to be cut for every row and you can’t put them at the end. No, that would be too easy. They had to be tucked somewhere in the middle so it didn’t screw up the pattern… which meant cutting one other shingle on every row as well.
Time consuming? You could say that.
It literally took us all friggin’ day to do the back half of this little roof.
Okay, so the fact that the husband bought the wrong size flashing at Home Depot the night before (because he went without me and therefore to the wrong store) and then had to go back to Home Depot to return it the next day and get the right size flashing (again without telling me and therefore to the wrong store ) and because Home Depot doesn’t sell the right size flashing ( we’d bought the right size flashing across town at Lowes a month ago ) he also had to take a trip to Lowes.
The moral of that lengthy run on sentence? Tell your wife before you go somewhere so she can tell you you’re wrong. It will save you time and aggravation….. and she’ll thoroughly enjoy it.
No, that ridiculous waste of time didn’t help.
Of course, yours truly telling the husband he should have checked with me first didn’t help either…. but you know I had to.
Needless to say I put some physical distance between us after that comment.
I’m not sure the big barn porch was far enough, but at least it was out of hammer strike range.
So progress was slow, but it was progress.
And here’s a picture of a spider carrying off a dead fly….
Just for variety’s sake.
And then finally it was done.
But I didn’t get a picture because I was inside cooking dinner.
Hey, you’ve seen one crooked baby barn roof, you’ve seen them all.
It’s not like I don’t welcome and feed all our visiting critters enough of a variety.
Three types of bird seed, suet, strawberries, peanut nuggets, oranges, grape jelly, blueberries, nectar, deer grain, salad scraps, old bread, apples and pears…
Christ, I even buy special dog food with taurine for the foxes.
And we don’t have a dog!
So yes, I was a little peeved when I went to sit on the barn porch the other day..
The husband mowing the grass over the septic tank?
Not blog worthy.
But the husband mowing the grass over the septic tank with one arm because he’s done some kind of damage to his left shoulder and the appendage is hanging uselessly?
Relatively blog worthy.
It took me a week of him alternating ice packs and heating pads. A week of him moaning, groaning and being perfectly miserable before I could get him to the doctors for an exam and an X-ray.
Thankfully nothing was broken or dislocated. They said it might be muscle trauma, might be a pinched nerve. In other words they have no idea.
A weeks worth of Prednisone has helped a bit, but just when we were making baby barn headway….
It seems we’ll be looking at this a while longer.
I’m seriously beginning to think that building is cursed.
Let’s face it, there’s going to be a weekly baby barn update for the duration of the deconstruction/construction.
Which, at this point…. I figure will end sometime between Jesus, isn’t it done yet? and  If I have to pry one more splinter out of my hand, I’ll shoot myself in the head and call it good.
Walls.
If you’re an immigrant during this administration? Not Good.
If you’re a rotting baby barn circa 1974? Very good.
Here’s a pic of the husband using his vintage (what feels like 50lb) saw.
You’ll notice he’s hunched over and applying pressure. That’s because the damn thing shimmies like a tilt a whirl on crack and might fly apart if you don’t.
Walls.
They’re a good thing. But sometimes…
You see where I’m going with this?
From the outside all looks well.
From the inside, things went a little squirrelly on the right.
Crooked?
Do we care?
We do not.
Do we wait for the wife to bring the dust pan during clean up?
So, another weekend done.
Another section framed and ready for siding.
Did I mention that the husband’s plan of starting at the halfway point on the front and working his way around makes it look a bit odd?
Our old baby barn/shed has a dirt floor with heavy duty rubber mats on top. Due to numerous woodchuck holes and tunnels, we had to drag all the mats out. That sounded easy enough until I realized each one of them weighed the equivalent of an African elephant…
Seriously.
A pregnant, morbidly obese African elephant carrying a suitcase I packed for an overnight trip.
Did I mention they were all covered in pounds of dirt as well?
So as we’re moving the next to last mat…..
This.
A chipmunk burrow with tiny scraps of paper, plastic and leaves.
Upon further examination…
A maze of tunnels, which I thought was pretty cool, until… it moved.
Do you see the leg?
Yeah.
Not a tunnel.
A nursery…
Which means we had to find the other end of the tunnel and relocate them. Not an easy task.
Five minutes after we found them?
Momma found us.
And she wasn’t happy.
She ran around squawking and chirping and looking for her babies.
After a while I think she found them, because she stopped searching and started stuffing.
Stuffing her little cheek pouches full of all those little scraps of paper….
And scurrying back for more.
Within minutes she’d cleaned up the whole lot.
Watch her cram a dried leaf that’s almost bigger than she is below.
(And please pardon my husband’s cursing. Things were not going well with the rebuild at this point…)
After we wasted time relocating chipmunks, we realized we had to relocate a bird’s nest as well.
So many evictions.
I felt like an evil slumlord.
Back to work…. and things did not go well.
Which was completely the husband’s fault.
He had the crazy idea he could square the building properly (After 40 plus years of Maine frost heaves? Madness!) and changed the original footprint….. which in turn threw everything off kilter.
More good times.
Did I mention he uses tools from the 1950’s picked up at a yard sale or the dump?
This little jewel feels like it weighs 50 lbs.
But he has the original box… and vintage lube.
So it’s special.
P.S. For those of you who pay attention, this post is actually out of sequence. That back wall is gone now. Apparently my blog scheduling has run amok.
My husband’s master plan involves a serious amount of temporary screwing, refitting, removing and replacing. He’s not a huge fan of measuring… but he’s a man.
This is not surprising.
Of course this means 3 times as much work.
I think one planned demolition and rebuild would suffice…. but I’m a woman.
What do I know?
There’s also a good deal of shifting the husband’s crap we don’t need now, nor will we ever need again  stuff from one place to another. Like the hurricane generator we bought in 1992 when we lived down south and haven’t used since.
Or the wheel weights for the tractor we no longer own.
Or the numerous tires for the cars we no longer own.
Or the table that went with the chairs we no longer own….
Right beside the small refrigerator I had no earthly idea we owned.
All of these things are heavy and filthy and must be moved over and over again because he can’t be convinced to throw them out.
Good times.
There was hammering.
And crowbar-ing …. and yes. A good deal of cursing because the structure is 45 years old and not exactly plumb.
There was also a good deal of displaced dirt.
Thanks to numerous woodchuck tunnels…
Which undermined our attempt to simply re-side and re-shingle the damned thing.
Now we have to completely dig up the hard packed floor and smooth it all out.
You may remember me posting pictures of our little red barn/shed.
We use it as a shed, but it was originally a small barn complete with horse. The horse is long gone…. and 40 odd years later?
The barn/shed is almost gone as well.
Falling apart?
You could say that…
Rotted wood?
The mere fact that it’s still standing never ceases to amaze me.
It’s horrible. An eye sore on our otherwise lovely property. The bane of my existence for a long, long time.
It’s state of disrepair is the main reason we spent $50,000 and 7 years of nights and weekends building a new and much larger barn.
The plan? All the mowers and weed whackers, the snow blower, the tractor and assorted yard tools that were in the shed/barn were supposed to go into the new barn…. and the eyesore would be torn down.
But that never happened, and now the husband….. who has already filled the new barn with CRAP wants to rebuild the shed/barn to continue housing the mowers, tractor etc.
So this is happening.
Husband deemed part of the interior framing sound, and started what I thought was deconstruction of the back half…. which needs to be completely rebuilt..
Now my idea of deconstruction consists of ripping off the roof, then the walls. The husband’s?
I’m not quite sure.
He put up a new piece of wood…
Ostensibly to brace the roof… though why you need to brace something you’re tearing down is beyond me.
But look at the piece he’s bracing! Rotted doesn’t begin to describe it…
Then…
Yeah. He trimmed it…
The rotted piece of wood.
He sawed off a section of wall… by hand, even though the chainsaw was right there.
And made a bigger hole.
He elongated the brace….
And added wood running along the bottom.
He was supposed to be tearing it down…. so WTH?
Naturally I had to ask.
And naturally, he wouldn’t answer.
It was hot, he was cranky and I dared to question his technique.
Silly me.
Where there's only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.
River's world..... 