One weekend down...

This past weekend, Friday evening through Sunday afternoon, four of us began the work of cleaning out the barn in New Albany. The picture below shows some of the junk we removed.

So far we have removed a few dozen old house doors, about 40 old windows, dozens of steel panels that we think may have been from the facade of an old gas station (visible in the right foreground below), a cast iron bath tub (also below), doors from some public restrooms, an old overhead garage door set, quilting frames, over 25 large metal shelving units, dozens of wheeled platforms (original use unknown), various pulleys, hinges, and barn parts, plenty of boards of various sizes, thicknesses, and quality, and enough hay to cover the floor of the entire barn about a foot deep.

The organ (see "Do you need an organ?", May 19th) was taken apart for the wooden panels on the outside by friends of the property owner, and, sadly, the rest of the organ's "innards" were burned to get rid of them. We also helped the owner dispose of a huge pile of tree branches that burned for 44 hours and was still burning when we left the property about 4pm on Sunday.

New Albany is on Eastern Daylight Savings Time but we were on Eastern Standard Time. That didn't make much difference to us except when one of us asked the time of one of the family members.

We still have a lot of things that can come out of the barn before we begin to remove the siding and the roof. There are a few parts of the lofts that are too badly rotted to be used. They will be burned on site or removed for firewood.

There are lightening rods on the roof, but they will be kept by the owner. Other farm items, like a tiller, rain barrels and some hand tools are being kept by the owner also. Metal items with scrap value as seen in the picture are being sold. We still have to dispose of all the old doors and the steel shelving.

We hope to work a bit more this coming weekend, and then we'll step back for a week or two while the owner finishes the steps to assign a value to the barn for tax purposes. We have found smaller barns for sale and will provide some pricing data to help determine a fair market value.

Let us know if you'd like to help. It's real work, but it's been fun too.