Barn Raising - Conclusion

Sorry for not being able to post the barn progress as I had hoped. As Mary Susan indicated, there have been considerable time constraints and I would add that I was awfully tired last week and was looking forward to sleep when time was available. Good fellowship and conversation also took priority over blogging. So, with the excuses out of the way, I offer the following chronology for those who may be interested. Before I forget, let me declare up front that this has been one of the most rewarding, encouraging and edifying events of my life. I thank the Lord for placing our lives in the path of such sincere, humble, and joyful brothers and sisters.
Day 3 - Tuesday
This is the day I had designated to install the trusses. I used steel trusses that were engineered to give us a full 40' open span. These trusses are designed to support the roof load and have plenty of strength in that capacity but can hardly handle any other type of load. The result is that they are fairly fragile and must be handled carefully on the ground. We had to add a pair of 20' 2"x6"s on either side to add some rigidity during installation. That, however, was not the big problem we encountered.

Being a cheapskate at heart, I did not rent the proper equipment to handle and install the trusses. I decided to rig the bale spear on the tractor with a boom pole and a block and tackle. During the first attempt to raise a truss, I noted an undesirable and scary deflection in the bale spear. At that point, I stopped the operation and we decided to support the load on the boom pole with the addition of a 20' 6x6. With the resulting drive into town to fetch the post and finding a way to attach the post to the boom, it was noon before the first truss was in place. By the end of the day we only had two more trusses in place, but we made several improvements and hoped to speed up the process in the morning.

Day 4 - Wednesday
With renewed enthusiasm and strength and an improved system, we installed the remaining 3 trusses by 11:00 a.m. We split into two teams with one team working on the purlins and the other team beginning the process of pulling wire from the house to the barn.

When we built our house, I had the electricians bury conduit from the house to the site where I had someday hoped to build a barn. I specified 60A service at the barn and left it to their discretion to do the right thing. The result was that the electricians installed 1" Schedule 80 PVC which is really too small for the 450' distance the barn is from the house. So the wire-pulling team knew they had their work cut out for them. I had mentioned that it would be nice to have power at the chicken house to our electrical lead. In considering ways to minimize the difficulty of the long wire-pull, he decided to take advantage of the chicken house request and install a junction box, thereby introducing the possibility of breaking the one long pull into two shorter ones. With the liberal application of wire lube, the initial pull of 3 #4AWG wires through the skinny little tube was accomplished with modest effort.

After that initial accomplishment, we moved to tackle the second section. We soon discovered that we were unable to suck a line through that section and after some effort, discerned that there was water in the conduit at the low point between the barn site and the chicken house. We tasked a team of diggers, some of the younger fellows, to excavate the conduit so that we could cut and drain the line. After a couple of hours of digging and creating an enormous hole, they finally found the conduit. Several gallons of water were left to drain overnight.

Day 5 - Thursday
We resumed the power-line pull after patching the drain point. The initial plan was to continue the pull straight through the junction box since the initial pull had been fairly easy. Before resuming the pull, 3 more wires were added to the already crowded conduit in order to provide power to the chicken house. The additional drag of the pull wire in the second section of conduit and the new wire in the first section proved to be too much to handle and we had to fall back to the original plan of completely pulling all of the wire through the first section and then pulling the remainder of the wire through the second section. Using this approach, we were able to complete the wire run with relative ease.

If my memory serves, we finished installing the first half of the purlins on this day but the
number of work hours was limited by a rain storm and we had cut the work short in order to clean up and prepare for the barn dance.

Barn Dance
Okay, as you may have guessed, the original plan was to dance in the completed or nearly completed barn. Well, we just weren't to that point yet and so the barn dance became a driveway dance with the garage being cleared out just in case the rain made a return visit. The relocation didn't seem to dampen spirits and we spent a couple of hours contra dancing under the direction of an excellent caller and were blessed with live music for one of the dances. One father and son along with the caller's husband played for us. For me, it was the highlight of the evening. Day 6 - Friday
With rain threatening, we hurried to complete the electrical connections and installation of
lights and an outlet. We installed a section of the steel roofing over the breaker box in anticipation of the rain. The remaining EMT conduit and lighting were installed and the the final connection was made in the early afternoon. I wish that I had had the camera with me while the circuits were being completed in the hot box with heavy rain and lightning in the background. Our dear guests were scheduled to leave this afternoon. With the job not yet complete, they very generously determined to stay an extra day in with the hope that the rain would break by morning and we would be able to get the remaining roof installed.

Day 7 - Saturday
The rain finally quit around 7:30 a.m. or so. The team headed to the job site and very efficiently
installed the remaining purlins followed by the roofing. I called in extra hands to pitch in and
they were very helpful. The final sheet of roofing was installed around 1:00 pm. Toward the end, the guys on the roof were running short on screws and baking under a beautifully blue, sunny sky.

With grateful hearts (and a looming sadness) we said goodbye to our good friends. With the help of my family, I completed installation of the ridge cap that evening.

Conclusion
This has been a rather dry recounting of the barn-related events of the week. I haven't even touched on the daily gathering for worship, the sound of psalms being sung from the front porch while marveling at the beauty of a thunderstorm and all the support lovingly provided by the ladies. Perhaps I can get Mary Susan to take some time to share some of those activities when she gets a chance. One of the ladies assembled a wonderful slide show if you would like to
take a peek into our amazing week.

Keith

Still no time!

Hopefully Keith or I will have time in the next day or so to post about the barn-raising. In the meantime, see a couple of pictures and a few words about it here: http://stoufferslivingsimply.blogspot.com.

Mary Susan

Great Week!

We had a great week, but have a lot of laundry, etc., to get caught up on. I don't have time to write a post worthy of the week now, so I'll wait until I do--or better yet, Keith will, but he's back at work and in meetings all week, so it will be difficult for him, too.

Suffice it to say that the house and farm are quiet--too quiet--and that we miss the folks from Georgia and the local friends who helped. What great fellowship we had. They sharpen and encourage us and are a tremendous blessing.

Mary Susan

Barn Raising - Day 2

Yet another awesome day for the barn raising. The weather was perfect and all the workers were diligent. In the morning, the boys put in tee posts for about 700 feet of fence while a good buddy and I measured and marked all of the posts level with the lowest post using a garden hose water level. This task turned out to be a bit tedious and slow, but the end result was level posts and with that I am very satisfied. The first family from the Georgia crew arrived around 1:00 pm and we took a lunch break. After lunch, the dad and son from Georgia, began work excavating a conduit I had buried to deliver power to the barn. We're expecting a bit of a challenge pulling the wire to the barn location from the house - more on that at another time.

We finished the day by tying the posts on each side together with 2x8 boards in order to maintain proper spacing and add some stability to the structure. The picture for day 2 doesn't quite capture the labor involved, but we hope to have the trusses set by the close of tomorrow.

Keith

Barn Raising - Day 1

What a glorious day. Good weather, good friends, rewarding labor. At the end of this first day, this is where we stand. Click on the picture to see a larger version. Perhaps it's a little anticlimactic for the viewer, but for those of us who worked today, it is a beautiful site.

We did end up using the borrowed auger and it was as great labor saver. The ground couldn't have been any better suited for using that tool today. To the owner of the auger, I extend a hardy thank you.

To those with keen eye, you may notice that the site hasn't been leveled and prepared in the customary manner. Well, that's just the way it is and we hope that we won't regret it. From within the posts, it appears that it will be a useful and much needed space.

We shared two wonderful meals with two colaboring families. In addition to preparing the meals, the ladies also enjoyed good fellowship and were (I believe) able to complete some crafts.

We are truly thankful to the Lord for this great day. We look forward to the Lord's day tomorrow and the opportunity to remember his resurrection.

Keith

Ready, Set, ...

Almost Go! The preparations for the barn raising are all in place. The barn has been sited (thanks to my Pastor and oldest son), materials are on site and the barn dance has been scheduled for Thursday evening. A couple of local families who have become good friends and with whom we enjoy truly edifying fellowship are coming over Saturday to help us get a jump on the construction. We hope to get several if not all the poles set. In order to speed up this process, I will be borrowing a tractor auger from a buddy after work this afternoon.

Our friends from Georgia will begin arriving Monday afternoon. By mid-week we hope to be hosting around thirty or so enthusiastic brothers and sisters in the Lord – all here to encourage and help and exhort. We are truly blessed.

We have been hoping and planning for opportunities to practice the “one another” scriptures in this sort of way for some time now. Maybe, just maybe, with a little deliberateness we can shed some of our rugged individualism in exchange for more interdependence and thereby begin to walk worthy of the vocation wherewith we are called.

Keith

Interesting Day

We had an interesting day today.

We got up a little early and got necessary chores done. Keith took the day off so we could all go to the agriculture committee hearings on a bill limiting NAIS for small farmers. Turns out there was a bill on raw milk, too. This was our first opportunity for insight into the political process. We came away discouraged and disappointed. The kids are amazed at how ill-informed most of the folks on the committee are. The rep. who introduced these two bills seems to have at least a bit of a grip on the facts regarding these issues, but he's one of a very few.

The raw milk bill was defeated 5-8. Comments such as "set us back 70 years" and a comparison of raw milk to boot-leg whisky clearly show the ignorance of the folks that seem to hold so much power.

The NAIS-limiting bill seems common-sense (as did the raw-milk one), but was held off until June for further study. Justin Sanders said in an email last week that getting this bill past committee was "going to be a tough battle." After seeing the political process in action, I think that's an understatement.

A very nice perk to the morning, though, was that we were able to meet up with some friends who were also at the hearings. Afterward, they followed us to the restaurant where Keith's brother is a manager, and we enjoyed good conversation and a good lunch.

Once home, we had a package from a nearby nursery with berry plants, bushes, and trees. Keith got a post-hole digger and set to work; others of us planted, and helped measure and make straight lines; daughter #2 and 3yo harvested asparagus, collected eggs, played on the tractor, etc.

We planted five each of two varieties of blueberries, five blackberries, five raspberries, two plum trees, four apple trees, five forsythia, five spirea, and five willows. That was a nice way to end the day; a bit of hope after a somewhat hope-dashing morning at the legislative plaza.

Mary Susan