The Old Barn.

It's been a while since I've posted an update. The project hasn't stalled, but I will admit that with the colder weather and early sunsets things have slowed down. The other reason is the things I have been doing haven't been very post worthy. Lots of cleaning, minor fixes and the like, but not really anything that would be considered interesting to an outside observer. But today I did something i felt was worth talking about. I found a good use for the money I've made from all the metal I have been scrapping out of the barn. 

It's a 60 gallon Dewalt compressor. I was going to wait until I had the building a little more ready for it, but tractor supply started their black friday sale and had them 25% off so I pulled the trigger. I'm pretty stoked about it. I have a lot of air tools that I haven't been able to use since I stopped working on cars for a living. For years now I have been doing all my automotive wrenching with hand tools, but now that I'm getting close to 40 years old I'm more than ready to get ugga dugga back. I need run power for it and plan my plumbing yet. Also I want remove the factory tank drain and replace it with some pipe and a valve to stick out the side to make it easier to access. I figure if I make draining the water easy I may actually, you know, do it once in a while.

Buy an electric drain, it's a life saver

I've been working on the upstairs future woodshop. I put my lighting up. It is eight 100w equivalent LEDs. The seem to light up the 30x30 space pretty well.

Then we tore off the boards that were used in the grain compartment dividers. There was about 50 oak boards, rough cut, 1-1.5" thick, 6-8" wide, and 4 feet long. I should be able to make something nice out of those. I still need to remove the logs that make up the framework of the compartments. 

I love some good antique swag to decorate the shop so I was super stoked to find some minty license plates that are closing in on a century old. There's just one little problem......

They cut them in half. That sucks. But it's a pretty clean cut, so I'm gonna try to put them back together good enough to be presentable.

That 5/4 wood would make a great and beautiful workbench. 

In reply to preach :

One of my first planned projects once the building is up and running is actually a nice woodworking bench, but it will be made from some hardwood 3x5's I salvaged from the big barn. I'm pretty excited about it. When i was using the house garage for woodworking i would use a slab door on some plastic sawhorses for a bench. It is a terrible way to try to plane a board.

That is going to be an amazing building when you get it done. Color me jealous. 

I've been making slow and steady progress on the wood shop upstairs. I needed to remove the log framing through the middle of the space, but I was worried about how much structural support it provided. So I measured across the vertical posts, then removed the top center beams.

I let it set like that for about two weeks, and measured it every couple days. I figured that way if the walls started to spread I could pull them back together and put the top beam back in place. But luckily that wasn't necessary, after two weeks the building hadn't spread at all, so I carried on. I removed the rest of the logs, i even managed to sell a few logs to a coworker. 

It really made it look a lot bigger getting the logs out of the way. Since then I have just been working on fixing any holes in the floor and trying to visualize what I want floorplan to be.

Been following along. Really like your project. Be way worth it when it's done!

In reply to Norma66-Brent :

Thanks for following! It's been a big job but it's been a lot of fun too. I've really been enjoying turning it into what I envisioned when it was just a slowly decaying building on the other side of my driveway. 

I found a local guy to tear down the big barn. He builds furniture and remodels houses, so he will take down barns for free if he can keep the materials.

I had to clean out the junk so the building is ready for him. Some of that junk was all the store shelves from when the local Kmart shut down about 30 years ago. There are a lot of shelves in a kmart. Roughly 12,000 pounds of shelves. Or two 16 ft bale wagons stacked five feet high. So far I have recouped roughly half the purchase price of the property just from hauling in the scrap they left. I count that as a win.

I started walling off the lean to side of the shop. I am doing this for a couple reasons. The lean to is supposed to take the place of my storage shed, so lawn mower and go cart parking, lawn tools, just general junk. So the wall will hide that stuff from view of the shop. Also my compressor is going over there, so the wall should cut down the noise some. Third reason is to make the main shop easier to heat. 

To keep the "old barn aesthetic" intact, I decided to use siding boards and corrugated roofing from the big barn for the wall. I think its gonna look good.

I figured it was time for a status update. Remember the big barn that was too damaged to save?

Going

Going

Gone

I got an estimate last night from a local excavation company to come clean up what was left of the big barn. When you realize you're going to have a track hoe and bulldozer at your house scope creep really kicks in. But I figure if I'm already paying him to be there i might as well get as much done as possible.

So it's going to be dig a hole and bury the footer, as well as a concrete slab from a shed I tore down, and smooth out the area so I can plant grass. Also knock down a big elm tree that is dying. Also put in a driveway up to my workshop and maybe a gravel parking area next to the workshop. The estimate was actually cheaper than I expected, and sometimes you just gotta pay the man. I sure dont have a good way of doing most of that.

The guy that owns the excavation company is a pretty interesting dude. He is probably 75 years old, and grew up about a half mile down the road. He told me stories about mowing the grass on my property when he was a kid, and shoveling beans out of my grainery when he worked for the elevator in high school. The tree I want him to take down is huge. When I asked him how big of a tree he can knock down with his hoe he just got a real mischievous grin and said "Oh, I can knock down any size tree." I think he likes knocking down trees. 

I spent the evening salvaging the stone pilings that were the original foundation for the oldest part of the barn. I think we will use them for some landscaping. Maybe a stone patio.

Here is what the patio ended up looking like. It's a nice little spot to sit.

The current order of business, the roof is looking pretty shabby

So I'm painting it. I'm using fibered aluminum roof coating. It's not a fun job, but it's not that bad.

At least the view is nice up here

I've been working on woodshop this week. Since forever my woodworking bench has been a slab door on a set of rickety sawhorses. It worked fairly  well since I was working out of the attached garage and it could all be put away when I was done. Since I now have a dedicated woodworking area its time for an upgrade. 

I made the two bench tops 6'x3', with 32" wide area for the miter saw, which is lowered down 3.5" so the miter saw surface is even with the bench tops. I also added an 18" table on the end for my drill press. So the whole shebang is about 16' long.

Nice! 

Another thing that needed work was the stairs. The opening was just hole in the floor with no railing, so you were always one stumble away from falling out of the second floor. I want my kids to be able to come up and hang out with me safely so I put in a stair rail.

I ran wiring for outlets and added some lights over the workbench today.

It's much nicer now. I also made a drill bit holder for my spade bits because they were kind of a mess

Today I spent way too much time getting the miter saw dialed in. I started out getting it level to the bench tops on both sides. That was easy enough, I used cardboard and playing cards as shims until it was right. Then I wanted to reset the fence to square, I hadn't done that in forever, probably six years ago when I bought it. That took forever. I would get the left side set then the right side would  be off. I realized the fence isn't actually straight. So I took it off and sanded it until it was pretty straight. Now it's set fairly close.

I decided I needed a pencil/marker/knife box to keep that stuff from cluttering up the bench. Since I've never hand cut dovetails I figured I'd give that a try. It's slow and I only got one corner done, but it ain't too ugly.

I bought this cool old woodworking vice like five years ago and it had been sitting on a shelf ever since. I finally got it mounted and cut some new boards for the jaws.

I haven't done much lately on the barn, but I have been doing a fair amount in the barn. I rebuilt the mower deck on my deere 318. It's so quiet now I can barely tell when the deck is on. 

Another project is I found an old field cultivator that my grandpa bought new around 1950. It had been sitting behind my uncle's barn for decades. It had a two point hitch that John Deere only used for a couple years and sold very few of them, so that made the cultivator obsolete when grandpa sold the Model A. I thought it would make a nice tool for my garden, so I made a three point hitch for it. I haven't got a chance to try it out yet, the ground has been too wet, but I'm going to till some bean ground at dads to knock the rust off and see how it does. If my hitch doesn't fall apart I will shoot some paint at it and call it good.

In reply to gearheadmb :

If you raised the miter saw up you can use the counters as feeding tables