Wow.  I never thought I could get so much work done on a Tuesday night.  After drinking a few cups of our Sumatran coffee, and a pair of chocolate chip cookies from the Mennonites next to us at the farmers market, I found myself alone for the night with the wife and kid at an ‘away’ swim meet.

A bike ride, watch a movie, play some loud guitar?  Nope, off to the farm to weed the veggie gardens.  No one would complain that I was gone for the evening.  Then it hit me.  I had a pile of cardboard at the house that could be kindling.

So, a fire start in the new burn pit.  When we had rented the skid loader, I gained a large amount of dirt from next to the barn.  It was a sloped spot that I flattened into a terrace, and lined on 3 sides with concrete from the rubble pile.  I started tossing in a few sections of barn.  Since it was a larger area than the original burn pit, I was able to alternate sides and keep a bigger, but lower, fire all night.  And the best part was, it was within tossing distance of the barn itself.  Let me tell ya, it burned full bore.  I never saw ‘white-hot’ before now.
I alternated sides of the pit to feed.  When full, I would go pull grass from around our small corn and sunflower patch that we’ve been trying the last two years.  The grass and thistle comes up faster when you till a section.  The good news is that there is a lot of corn and sunflowers starting to grow faster than the grass for once.  I think I gave it fighting chance.  Every now and then I would go toss another hunk of barn on the pile then go find some more nearly lost vegetables.

Actually, the barn pile started to disappear for once.  I found ground not seen in a year.  There is plenty to go, but this was progress.  In 3 hours I burned more than I usually managed to burn all day last year.  Finally at 8:30, I stopped adding wood to the fire and started kicking back the edges.  It took another hour to wind down enough for me to bury and water.

As the fire burned out, the fire-files/lightning bugs took over.  The huge field south of our place lit up, as if there was a green ember on nearly every stalk of corn out there.  You would have thought I set the field on fire, but green flashes came from every spot I could see.  I watched in amazement.  No other field seemed to match the intensity on the way home.

Cleanup, progress, amazement all in a single evening?  Our farm is fun.

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So, do Two Barn Farms postings allow updates to the downtown building too?

Anyhow, the roof issue is from ponding, where a flat roof isn’t so flat anymore and allows puddles to form.  While our roof has a slight slant to it, there are two good puddles on each side of the building, just shy of the roof edge.  During the winter, the water here froze and thawed, causing the roof membrane to leak.  It was a slow drip, and even though there is standing water, there isn’t much coming in right now.

Since Rick was done cutting fence pickets from the barn siding, I sent him to work on a new project, pulling down the original plaster ceiling in the back room, so we could see what was going on.

Well, it wasn’t the original ceiling, that one was another four feet up!  Rick managed to pull down two ceilings over the back room, in about 3 hours.  Then it dawned on me what the problem was.  All the roof rafters were level.  The roof was not.  Half of the room’s ceiling joists had another 1x board nailed to the side of it reaching up to the roof decking.  The last half of the room did not.  The decking isn’t even touching 5-6 joists.  That’s why it’s sagging!   So, the fix may be easy.  There are two joists that look like they have been quite wet.  We’ll have to see if they are still solid.  There is another one that is cracked.  From there, we need to extend these up to the proper level to hold the roof at a proper slope.

We have exposed a lot of brickwork.  There is some repair to be done of course, being from 1890-something.  We’ll have to do some tuckpointing, then we’ll coat everything with a surface bond anyway.  We plan on adding a false wall on the interior, just to add insulation, wiring, and provide a spot for nails.  We also measured out all the windows for replacement.
This should keep us busy for a few years.

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Not much has been getting done at the farm lately.  Weekdays are great, but the weekends keep turning soggy.  I did get our first circuit of lights installed, so that we have the possibility of working past dusk for once.  We all have been planting, weeding, and tending to the gardens that seem to love this type of weather.

I got another small piece of sill fixed, so we can start wrapping around to the ‘greenhouse’ side of the crib.  I really need to finish the siding on the ends first.  That will be next.

Today was also the first day of work on the downtown building.  The WHAT?  Yes, we own a building in downtown Jefferson.  No, there are no immediate plans for a coffee house.  We have business tenets, and they are welcome to stay there.  The upstairs, like most of the buildings in Jefferson, has been neglected for years.  We got a leak in the roof fixed, which we verified today as fixed.  But years of empty neglict takes it’s tolls.  Plaster has fallen from the exterior brick walls, different parts of ceiling - mainly tiles - fave fallen, plus all kinds of trash.  I had a dumpster delivered, and unfortunately filled it quickly.  We could have used two of them.  Running a broom, and in some cases a shovel, through the place made a massive difference.  Getting rid of old nasty bits of blankets, a mattress, boxes, broken furniture gave me a huge amount of hope.  From not seeing the floors, to seeing how great the wood really is gives a huge sign of relief.

We’ll have to start taking pictures once it’s sunny again.

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