Waldershrek
Silver Member
Well the project has started after a couple years of convincing parents it's the way to go (They wanted to let it fall down and build a Morton building).
Backstory on the barn, was build in the mid to late 1800's. Is 30x64, post and beam construction. My parents house originally went with this barn and some other outbuilding back in the day however when they bought it in 1984 the house was sold seperately from the barns and land. All they could afford was the house. A man who lived down the road had moved from NYC was buying up everything in sight and he bought the barns and land along with several other farms that had gone up for sale around the same time. Anyway, the owner rented out the barn to a local farmer who wasn't the best upkeeper of things. He left barn doors open for many years, random junk was all over around the barn and in the barn and he had let heifers run loose in the downstairs portion of the barn. in 1998, the owner got cancer and had to sell a bunch of property to pay for treatment (didn't have health insurance) and my parents bought the dairy barn, a smaller horse barn next to it and 16 acres of field/pasture. The downstairs had about two feet of manure that had dried into a rock hard "**** concrete" over the years, there was junk EVERYWHERE inside and out of the barn and there was thousands of bales of junk hay in the loft. It took awhile to get everything cleaned out of the barn enough to where they could even use it. They have never really used the barn for much other than a little hay storage upstairs and storing lawn mowers, atv's etc downstairs. Over the years the roof has gotten progressively worse, one of the main beams upstairs broke and fell, the foundation on one side is crumbling partially due to the wonderful slurry mix they called concrete when it was built (ie creek gravel mixed with sand) and partially due to years of dirt and debris collapsing up against that side of the barn and then freezing and thawing many times per year.
Pretty much all the surrounding land around them has been bought up by Amish and my parents have really gotten along good with them. There was a stave silo next to the barn but earlier in the year the Amish were in need of it and so dad worked out with them they could take the silo if they would provide the labor and know how on fixing the barn and they agreed. My father works out of town and is only around 2 days a week so it's been a little slow getting everything going....last week we had a guy come with an excavator and dig all the debris and dirt away from the side of the barn. To say that side is in bad shape would be putting it nicely. The whole foundation is broken and crumbing but still standing, the sill plate is nonexistent, the whole wall on that side is either rotted or missing. He also got with one of the Amish guys who has a saw mill and ordered eight 6x6x12 beams for use as vertical beams in the hay loft as well as two 10x10x16 beams to replace the broken main beam. We spent the first part of this week moving stuff out of the downstairs of the barn and disposing of years worth of stuff (old lumber, building materials and other stuff collected over the years). The roof also leaks like crazy and as a result has caused rot in quite a few spots on the loft floor as well on some of the main beams in the loft so to fix this we will be putting a new metal roof on the barn (it is currently shingles that are barely there).
Our first priority is going to get the broken beam replaced. Obviously the barn isn't going to stand for long with a main load bearing beam and most of it's vertical beams gone/rotted.
With that said, I am wondering about a few things......
1. After the beam is put in, should we move to the foundation or the roof? My father seems to think they need to get a roof on asap. I think that the barn may not hold the weight a metal roof with that foundation on the one side of the barn basically non existent. I am trying to push for the barn to be jacked up on that side, foundation knocked out, new block wall put in, new sill plate, set barn back down and then worry about the roof once the barn is structurally sound.
2. We need to straighten the barn. it's leaning towards the "good side" of the barn. I know a popular method is attaching cables to the barn and then into the ground somehow and then winching the barn slowly back to straight. Has anybody done this to a building before? I'm not sure how the Amish normally go about this. I know they have done similar repairs on barns they bought around here but I don't know the specifics. More or less just looking on suggestions on how to handle this part of it.
I'll try and get some pictures taken tomorrow of the various problem areas and progress so far. Wish me luck, gonna be quite a project
Backstory on the barn, was build in the mid to late 1800's. Is 30x64, post and beam construction. My parents house originally went with this barn and some other outbuilding back in the day however when they bought it in 1984 the house was sold seperately from the barns and land. All they could afford was the house. A man who lived down the road had moved from NYC was buying up everything in sight and he bought the barns and land along with several other farms that had gone up for sale around the same time. Anyway, the owner rented out the barn to a local farmer who wasn't the best upkeeper of things. He left barn doors open for many years, random junk was all over around the barn and in the barn and he had let heifers run loose in the downstairs portion of the barn. in 1998, the owner got cancer and had to sell a bunch of property to pay for treatment (didn't have health insurance) and my parents bought the dairy barn, a smaller horse barn next to it and 16 acres of field/pasture. The downstairs had about two feet of manure that had dried into a rock hard "**** concrete" over the years, there was junk EVERYWHERE inside and out of the barn and there was thousands of bales of junk hay in the loft. It took awhile to get everything cleaned out of the barn enough to where they could even use it. They have never really used the barn for much other than a little hay storage upstairs and storing lawn mowers, atv's etc downstairs. Over the years the roof has gotten progressively worse, one of the main beams upstairs broke and fell, the foundation on one side is crumbling partially due to the wonderful slurry mix they called concrete when it was built (ie creek gravel mixed with sand) and partially due to years of dirt and debris collapsing up against that side of the barn and then freezing and thawing many times per year.
Pretty much all the surrounding land around them has been bought up by Amish and my parents have really gotten along good with them. There was a stave silo next to the barn but earlier in the year the Amish were in need of it and so dad worked out with them they could take the silo if they would provide the labor and know how on fixing the barn and they agreed. My father works out of town and is only around 2 days a week so it's been a little slow getting everything going....last week we had a guy come with an excavator and dig all the debris and dirt away from the side of the barn. To say that side is in bad shape would be putting it nicely. The whole foundation is broken and crumbing but still standing, the sill plate is nonexistent, the whole wall on that side is either rotted or missing. He also got with one of the Amish guys who has a saw mill and ordered eight 6x6x12 beams for use as vertical beams in the hay loft as well as two 10x10x16 beams to replace the broken main beam. We spent the first part of this week moving stuff out of the downstairs of the barn and disposing of years worth of stuff (old lumber, building materials and other stuff collected over the years). The roof also leaks like crazy and as a result has caused rot in quite a few spots on the loft floor as well on some of the main beams in the loft so to fix this we will be putting a new metal roof on the barn (it is currently shingles that are barely there).
Our first priority is going to get the broken beam replaced. Obviously the barn isn't going to stand for long with a main load bearing beam and most of it's vertical beams gone/rotted.
With that said, I am wondering about a few things......
1. After the beam is put in, should we move to the foundation or the roof? My father seems to think they need to get a roof on asap. I think that the barn may not hold the weight a metal roof with that foundation on the one side of the barn basically non existent. I am trying to push for the barn to be jacked up on that side, foundation knocked out, new block wall put in, new sill plate, set barn back down and then worry about the roof once the barn is structurally sound.
2. We need to straighten the barn. it's leaning towards the "good side" of the barn. I know a popular method is attaching cables to the barn and then into the ground somehow and then winching the barn slowly back to straight. Has anybody done this to a building before? I'm not sure how the Amish normally go about this. I know they have done similar repairs on barns they bought around here but I don't know the specifics. More or less just looking on suggestions on how to handle this part of it.
I'll try and get some pictures taken tomorrow of the various problem areas and progress so far. Wish me luck, gonna be quite a project