This Old Barn

[quicksandfarmer]

I decided that I needed to strip all of the shingles around the window in order to reframe it, and it's easier to strip down than up, and I'm going to have to strip the whole side eventually, so I decided to bite the bullet and set up the scaffolding and strip the whole side.

They say you should do something every day that scares you, setting up that scaffold by myself is about a month's worth.

Most of the work of removing shingles is taking the nails out, the shingles themselves are so old and brittle you can snap them with one finger. I try to collect the nails as I go, it's ultimately easier than picking them off the ground. Nine nails per square foot is the rule of thumb, so about six thousand nails for that wall.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

I need to do a bit of repair to the sill where the window leaked and it rotted. So with the siding out of the way I took off a piece of sheathing, it's true 4/4, sixteen inches wide.

The sill isn't structural. In this shot you can see the floor I put in last summer, and along the back of the sill you can see the new rim joist I put in at that time that is actually holding the floor up. You can see how the sill has sagged a bit and the stud stayed put so a gap opened up between the sill and the stud. That's how not-structural it is! Note the mortise and tenon at the bottom of the stud. Behind the stud is a piece that is going to sister that stud, it's just placed and not attached yet.

What I want to do is put something along the top of the sill to give the two studs on the sagging section a solid base. I haven't figure out quite what yet.

When I redid the floor last summer I tried jacking up that section of sill before installing the new rim joist, but I couldn't get it to budge.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

I found a few more labels while stripping shingles:

The third one says "Copyright 1949" in very small letters.

The address on the second one says "Seattle 1, Wash." "Seattle 1" is a Postal Zone, they were used in large cities from 1943 to 1963. In 1963 the USPS moved to ZIP codes and introduced two letter state abbreviations. So the labels were probably printed between 1949 and 1963. It's possible that the labels were used for a while after they were printed but I'm thinking they're about 60 years old.

 

[EddieWalker]

From the pictures, it looks like the damage is more from inside then outside. And it doesn't look like it's all that bad either.

What really surprised me in your pictures is how good the tar paper looks after all those years!!!

 

[quicksandfarmer]

From the pictures, it looks like the damage is more from inside then outside. And it doesn't look like it's all that bad either.

What really surprised me in your pictures is how good the tar paper looks after all those years!!!

The old-timers probably dosed the tar paper with arsenic or something to make it last!

Yeah, I don't feel like I have to strengthen the sill. Since I'm going to sister the studs in the wall there and put in cripples for the window I want to give them something flat to rest upon.

 

[Egon]

Tar paper at that time was quite a bit heavier than that of today. Almost like felt.

 

[IH3444]

Two weights of tar paper, 15# and 30#. That looks to be 30#. It is modern tar paper due to the lines on it.

 

[Indian Territory]

At least in my area, the buildings are usually much older than the tax records reflect. Of course that's Oklahoma which wasn't even a state until 1907. Your barn might be even older than you know.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

I finished the framing repairs, all the studs have been sistered and I reframed the notorious "vodka" window. I took down the temporary wall that was holding everything up and nothing moved so it looks good. The mess you see on the floor is all the 2x4's from the temporary wall, I decided to send them to the burn pile because they were old to begin with and I cut them all short, the wall was only about 78" high.

So I put up some house wrap on the outside today and started shingling.

I probably won't have much to report for a while, shingling is pretty boring. And I'm pretty slow at it.

 

[EddieWalker]

If a board is two feel long, or longer, it gets stacked in my garage for future use. I can't even count how many times I've used them for something I wasn't planning on.

 

[WinterDeere]

If a board is two feel long, or longer, it gets stacked in my garage for future use. I can't even count how many times I've used them for something I wasn't planning on.

Especially old timber out of the house or barn. Always easier to grab an old timber for a repair, than to artificially age a new one to match exposed framing.

What's fun is when you realize the timber you're reusing today, was also reused at least once or twice prior to the location in which you found it installed. I have numerous beams in both the house and barn, with non-sensical mortises and markings, probably from when they were previously used as posts in some earlier construction.

Our house was built in a few phases, and renovated a few times in-between, starting in or around 1734. I suspect my carriage barn came into being with a very large addition to the house in 1775, and that some of the beams used in the barn came out of the 1734 part of the house, when they tore the roof off of that to build the 1775 addition atop it.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

If a board is two feel long, or longer, it gets stacked in my garage for future use. I can't even count how many times I've used them for something I wasn't planning on.

Yeah, I have a pile like that, that's where most of the 2x4's for the temporary wall came from. But I ended up having to run to Home Depot to get a few more that were long enough and straight enough. Those I'll keep. Even though I'm thrifty Yankee through and through I just felt I already had too many short, twisted boards with nails in them to make it worth saving any more of them.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

Status update:
I've been doing some shingling. I figure I've done about two thirds of the shingling. Of course the angled rows take longer, and the higher you go the longer it takes.

I've been trying to do the housewrap as I go to avoid moving the scaffolding too much. I snapped this picture when it was time to move the scaffolding around again, I need to add another row of housewrap.

I had been going up with three columns of scaffolding, so I could go all the way across on each course. But I don't have enough scaffolding to do that all the way up, so I'm taking apart the left column and moving the pieces to the right. You can see that the last two courses of shingles only go 3/4 of the way across, once the right side of the barn is done I'll move it back over to the left and go up that side.

I have enough pieces to get to about the middle of the upper window with two columns. To get the peak of the gable I'll have to put all the scaffolding into a single column. I'm hoping there won't be a "Devil's triangle" that I can't reach from the center. I'll be able to get it, it will just mean a lot of moving scaffolding.

Edit to add: it was quite windy today, the radio said 20+ mph. It was so windy that shingles were blowing everywhere. When I took a couple out of the bundle I'd have to set the hammer on top to keep them from blowing away. Really slowed things down.

 

[bindian]

That is impressive. I bet them are starting to swag a little, that high up. Glad I have a telehandler and not scaffolding

 

[WinterDeere]

Looks great, quicksand. I've got barn envy.

 

[EddieWalker]

Slow and steady wins the race. I wonder what they used when the originally built it? Some sort of home made, scrap wood scaffolding?

 

[quicksandfarmer]

Slow and steady wins the race. I wonder what they used when the originally built it? Some sort of home made, scrap wood scaffolding?

When I was stripping the shingles I noticed every now and then there was a shingle with a strip of tar paper behind it, and behind that was a 1" or so hole drilled into the sheathing. At first I thought it was some sort of repair, but after a while I realized the holes were spaced evenly. I think they had some sort of scaffold that was bolted to the sheathing. As they went they just shingled around the bolts. Then they took the scaffold down and went back up on a ladder and put in the missing shingles, with a strip of tarpaper to cover the hole.

That's putting an awful lot of faith in the sheathing, it would make me queasy. I like my way better.

 

[WinterDeere]

I'm not scrolling back 14 pages to find it, but IIRC, this barn is not very old?

I know that when my house and neighboring houses were built (1720's - 1770's), the scaffolding was all 6x6 timber and built into the stone wall of the house. In other words, there are 6x6 inch pocket holes in the stone walls, into which the scaffolding was keyed. They'd build the scaffolding up as the stone wall went up, and then take the scaffolding down as they stucco'd from top to bottom, filling the key holes in the wall with whatever random stones they had laying around.

Most of the old scaffolding holes in our 1775 addition are oddly filled with brick, I say "oddly" because there's no brick used anywhere else in the house, and I can't imagine why they even had bricks on-site. Getting brick to this site from any major town having a foundry at that time would have been a long haul by ox cart, and so bricks were typically made on-site (and thus, very uncommon) in this time and place. You see more brick houses in towns from the 18th century, than remote farm houses, for this reason.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

I'm not scrolling back 14 pages to find it, but IIRC, this barn is not very old?

Circa 1850.

Oldest building in town is circa 1690, but there's very little before the 19th century.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

Today's update:

I only have enough scaffolding to do two columns to this height, so I did the right and center and then moved the scaffolding over and did the left. To go higher I have to rearrange into a single column, I snapped this picture while moving sections from the left to the middle.

Last week a neighbor stopped by who's a retired guidance counselor, I let him hunt on my property. He was checking his tree stands, and he was wearing a fall protection harness. "You're not wearing fall protection?" he said to me, and gave me what I can only describe as a guidance counselor look. I sheepishly admitted that I had a harness but wasn't wearing it. That night, lying in bed, I realized I should really be wearing fall protection. So the line coming out of the upper window is new since the last update, it's tied to a beam inside and where I tie off.