Barn, shed, and shop

Like many rural properties, Terribly Happy includes many structures that serve a variety of purposes. The major structures are the barn, house, and shed.

The house is the subject of other posts; this one focuses on the barn and shed.

The barn is big and (mostly) red.

It was originally a dairy barn, but probably has been used for miscellaneous storage for decades. These photos show how John (top) and we (bottom) have used it; note that we covered most of the openings in the far (northern) wall to keep the rain out.

About 20 or 30 years ago, a fire started inside that scorched many of the timbers, but it was extinguished quickly and structural integrity of the place is sound.

So far, we’ve used it mainly for storage, but we  also constructed a cool-storage space within it, as these before and after shots show.

The shed was (note past tense) a ramshackle affair built from whatever pieces of lumber seemed to be handy at various times in the past. Some of the posts consisted of three or four short pieces of 4” x 4” nailed together, most posts were more than halfway off their concrete piers, and cross braces had been added at random. It was a windowless structure with 6 openings, or “bays,” on one side.

It hadn’t been painted in a long time, so the wet Oregon winters were taking their toll on the wood.

For most of our first year, it housed the Prius, the pickup, and the 1948 Ford tractor and attachments that came with the place, plus other random stuff, lots of it junk, that had accumulated over time.

The enclosed section on the right is a chicken coop that, though structurally part of the shed, was salvaged during the demolition of the shed.

Hazen Parsons and crew agreed to tear down the shed in return for the tractor and attachments. The process is more accurately called “deconstruction,” because we salvaged much of the original timber—two-bys and 4” x 4”s that are significantly thicker than the slimmed-down stuff that’s been in use for the past 50 years. Some of that wood was donated to a wood-working neighbor; some has been re-used on later construction projects on Terribly Happy; some of it has been (or will be) sawn for firewood in our Tulikivi burner (see Tulikivi post).

Exterior removed (plus a view of the tractor)

Prepping for pulldown

Attaching to trailer hitch

Starting to fall...

Down -- with dust! Nice photo, Beth! (She took all of these—Richard was in San José at the time)


Some of the deconstructed lumber.

Once the site had been cleared, the concrete guys used their laser and tapes to map the area of the future replacement shed. Then they excavated holes,

inserted pre-formed rebar cages,

and added wood forms atop the cages.

Then, on a very muddy day, the (very heavy) mixer truck delivered concrete that was poured into the forms.

The steel for the new shed had been delivered earlier,

but we missed the actual construction because we were both out of town when the steel guys did their thing. This is what we saw when we returned

Hazen and the steel guys managed to tear down the old and construct the new without disturbing the original chicken coop, which now sits sheltered under the north end of the shed.

The center of the shed is now the home of a workshop, constructed by Estevan Slaughter and crew. After opening the doorway in the barn wall that you see at far right, they constructed a concrete pad atop the 3/4” gravel,

framed a 16’ x 16’ structure,

and finished the exterior, doors, and windows.

Later, Dave Shoemaker helped Beth insulate the interior with recycled denim (and bits of styrofoam).

Dave put up plywood interior walls, and constructed three worktables (he’s posing with one here).

The shop has been complete for several months, but we keep putting off the final step: consolidating our tools, which have been living in the barn, or the shed, or the house, or wherever we happen to leave them! A good chore for the rainy Oregon winter.