97, 98, 99...

Another week of barn dismantling is over. The temperature on Sunday reached 99 degrees, and the humidity was high enough that the barn floor was still wet Sunday evening after Thursday's rain. Despite that we made good progress last week. A friend who has recently moved to New Mexico was visiting Indianapolis and volunteered to put in two weekdays (what a guy!) and two other members helped through the weekend. See the weekend crew picture below taken by a grandson of one of the barns early owners who told of all the fun he had as a kid in the barn with Dolly, an old white horse.

Work has been done on eight days out of the last ten, so we'll soon run out of things that can be done on the ground. None of the roof work can proceed until at least two people who can be on the roof are on site at the same time. Not surprisingly, not everyone wants to get up there.

On Wednesday, an entire loft collapsed while we were removing wood from it, and Mother Nature pitched in by dropping about a third of the north end of the barn in a large storm on Thursday night when we weren't at the site. The same storm lifted a very heavy oak joist that was attached to a tarp for rain and sun protection now that the roof is off, and threw it about 15 feet further into the barn.

The other picture below shows the wood that was brought down "for free."

This coming weekend we'll have another go at it, probably from Friday through Sunday.

Aside from cleaning up little things, there are three major aspects left: finishing the roof - three pitches of purlins and all the rafters; taking down the headers, posts and beams; and moving the disassembled barn to Raccoon Creek.

The roof...
Our hope is to lower each rafter with two ropes managed from the ground as the people on the roof disconnect rafters from each other and tie them onto the ropes.

Before any of this can begin, we need to reinforce, and, in one case, supplement, three of the main posts along the north wall. We had known for some time that some of the posts would need to have their bottom foot to three feet replaced with sound wood when we reconstruct the barn, but the extend of damage to these three main posts was unknown until all the stalls, mangers, and loft floors and joists were removed. I think we can nail some of very solid (and very heavy) oak joists at multiple points to the bottoms of the bad posts to keep them stable while the rafters and remaining purlins are removed above them. This added support can remain on the posts until each is lowered to the ground and stacked for transport.

Major posts and beams...
We have discussed various methods of lowering the posts and beams. Hiring a large crane would be the quickest, but also the most expensive. Since we are trying to save the mortise and tenon connections between posts and beams and knee braces, a crane would be idle more than it was running to allow us time to pound (or drill) out the pins holding the connections. If we sacrific the pinned joints we could cut the connections with a saw and speed the rwmoval.

We discussed renting a cherry picker or a man-lift to get us up to each connection while we knock out the pins and tie the beams for lowering, and then using the same device to help lower them. The problem with this approach is that the beams may be too heavy to be lowered by the device which would also be supporting the weight of the operator.

We are considering starting from a corner and disconnecting each post from the beams connecting it, then lowering it, disconnecting the other end of each beam, and lowering each of them. The process would continue from post to post, always working on an outside corner post. We'll be discussing this approach with our advisor to see if it is feasible. It would take longer, but the cost would be very low, just lots of rope and pullies.

Moving the disassembled barn to Raccoon Creek...
We are trying to develop an inexpensive plan for loading, moving and storing the barn until next spring. That might employ a flat-bed trailer, or a covered trailer. The covered trailer, if kept over the winter would serve the added purpose of storing the lumber, and maybe other things, on the site. A flat-bed, on the other hand would be easier to load but the lumber would need to be covered in some other way.

If you know of anyone who might be able to help with this transportation and storage problem, please let us know at rcc@netdirect.net. If we don't solve it inexpensively, it could become the most costly aspect of the entire project.