Barn, Outbuildings and Property Restoration Update

Occasionally, on a Tuesday blog post, I share improvements and the restoration process as we work on the property we bought in Laurel Fork.  It has been a while since I have posted on a Tuesday and while we have been incredibly busy, the updates are just not as dramatic as when we put the board and batting on the old barn and gave it new life.  For those who might not have seen that transformation in previous posts, I have included a photo of "before" on this post as well.  The work to the barn recently has been a lot more subtle.  (By the way, the "fallen star" I front of the barn in this picture is the only damage we sustained during the recent wind storms other than an old, already dead tree that fell in a swampy area and put the telephone line on the ground in our front yard.)  The updates to the exterior of the barn include finishing the stain and putting up the rolling barn door that can be seen towards the back of the attached shed in the lower right of this photo. Mike made the door with board and batting to match the rest of the barn.  With the size of the door, it was extremely heavy and awkward to try to get on the track.  Mike used the loader to hold the door up and get it in line.  I assisted a little, but mostly he it was his ingenuity, stubbornness and strength that got the barn door in place.  There has been a lot of clean up going on around the barn as well including limbs sawed and stacked from dead trees, metal hauled off to the salvage yard on two different occasions, years of dirt and debris removed from the concrete at the sliding barn door to the right, front of the barn (under the barn quilt) and in front of the sliding door to the rear of the building.

 If you have been reading my journals, you are aware that we are having a heck of a time getting anyone to put a roof on the barn for us and I really don't want Mike up there doing it himself.  We have been promised an estimate from another company.  We hope they come through. Getting a new, metal roof on the exterior will pretty much complete the outside work on the barn itself and will give set it off.

Inside the barn, Mike work on the wooden feed rack at the back of the barn in the attached shed, replacing broken boards as well as creating a trough at the bottom to keep the cows from wasting so much hay.  (The photo below was taken as he was still working on it.  The feeder went the entire length of the loafing shed, but we took out about a third of it to give the cows room to lie down in the back when the weather is bad outside and to give us an area to get the loader through the building.)

Erosion had caused a lot of the soil in the loafing/feeding shed to be washed away.  Mike hauled in load after load of dirt to raise the floor about three feet in the farthest corner where erosion was so bad.  He first filled that corner in with large rocks and old cinder blocks.  Erosion is a real problem here in the mountains.

Mike has continued to clear and burn brush and cut trees. He has sown red clover on parts of the fields.

He has put a new metal roof on the chicken house, repaired the floor where it had rotted and built a partition so that we can have an area separate from the mature hens for raising peeps or for keeping feed. We have not bought anything new for inside the chicken house.  Instead we have salvaged and repurposed what we could find on the property.  He used old boards and some wire he found to make a divider and then added an old screen door so that we could access the area that had been divided off.  Even the metal that we used on the roof, while new, was discarded material from a commercial chicken house that Mike's nephew just built in Staunton  The old, vintage feeders we salvaged from the property.  .

Mike also moved a lot of dirt to fill in around the back of the house where there were low spots, holes and where the water collected around the basement walls.  He sloped the yard away form the house, sowed grass seed and covered it with straw.

We worked on getting some of the dead leaves, sticks and fallen branches out of the back yard where we can begin mowing soon.  I just love having a skid loader!  Put the leaves and sticks in the bucket and away they go!

Sometimes it seems as if the process has been slow and laborious.  We had intended to contract out some of the work but learned early on that if we could actually get anyone to show up at all, the work was either sub standard or the cost was really high.  We went to plan "B" and have been doing as much as we can do by ourselves which means it is a slow process.  We are hoping the contractors will give us a fair estimate for building fence and that they will actually show up.  If they don't, then it will take us a lot longer, but we will just have to do it ourselves.  And we have our fingers crossed that someone out there will finally come through and put a roof on the barn for us.