Friday, September 28, 2012

Barn doors installed.

Side Door in place, with some additional siding added. Still more to come.
 Jason, the wild man, came up this morning and we worked on the barn.  The front door is now almost complete.  Two of the bar supports are broken but thankfully I remembered there used to be another sliding door down by the milk shed.  There are five supports in great shape so we will snag three of them to attach to the front of the barn.  We hung the door any ways.

Side door, 10.5 feet high and 7 feet wide.
Next up was the side door leading to the second hay area.  We had to cut away some of the outer layer of siding.  It was so warped and rolled on the edges there was no way we could install the overhead track.  After we cut out the warped boards they had to be replaced.  I didn't have this door made yet so we laid the boards out on the ground in two overlapped layers and screwed them together.  Then we laid out the backwards Z and screwed it into everything.  Yep, it was very heavy.  We could not lift it off the ground.  In came the trusty tractor to the rescue.  Once we had the rollers attached we stood it on its end and walked it back toward the barn by hand.  Almost impossible due to weight.  There was no way we were going to get a one foot vertical lift to set the door in the track.  So we brought in the tractor again and shimmed it up to the tract height.  Jason stood on the ladder and I shoved.  It took a few tries and multiple shim adjustments but we got it in the tract.  Jason thinks it may need to be adjusted (crooked) but that would require us to take the door down again.  I said it looked and worked great we are leaving it.
Front door leading into hallway and tack room.
I am not so sure the honey bees are going to like the new door.  Their hive is on the far right side of the door when it is fully open.  I need to put in a couple more supports but by yesterday afternoon the bees were incredibly active.  It was not going to be possible to do anything and not get stung.  The real problem was I don't mind getting stung a couple of times, it just seemed like I was probably going to get stung by a large exponential number of 2, a very large number.  On the plus side, it is looking good for honey this winter! 
Jason and I are going to clean up all the metal and tin piles I have stashed all over the farm today.  I want to get those all gone so I don't keep hitting scrap metal when I am mowing on the farm. 

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