It was a busy few days

Cliff and I had planned a sort of impromptu vacation for this time period:  We were going to go to Colorado with the grandson and his wife.  I love Colorado, but for some reason I had a nagging feeling the time wasn't right for us to go.  Examining these feelings, I considered our cash flow:  We can only manage one good road trip a month, for the simple reason we don't charge anything we can't pay off in full each month.  We went to Omaha last month, then the big Illinois tractor show.  I wasn't so sure we could cover five days in Colorado after paying those two trips off (yes, we have savings, but not for frivolous use).  So, the money being tight was part of my "uneasy feelings".  Another thing was that in the back of my mind, I recalled the grandson working considerable overtime in the past month, and mentioning he was saving back the extra money to give the old barn here on the property a facelift.  I had a feeling all his saved money would end up being spent in Colorado.  I explained this to Cliff, and he told Arick to go ahead and take that week off, but rather than going to Colorado, the two of them would work on the barn.  

Now, this isn't a sturdy old 100-year-old barn with huge timbers in it for strength.  It started life as a garage, somewhere in Grandview, Missouri, I believe.  Cliff used the roof rafters from an old two-car garage for the roof of the main, middle part of this barn.  At the time I had the bright idea that we should just put the roof on the poles of the future barn, and as we got money, we could buy the tin for the roof and add the sides.  After about three years of that roof on poles standing out there, useless (although we did get the metal roof on it), we used a credit card and finished the rest of the walls; bad move on our part.  The side "lean-to's" were added later on, at different times.  

The grandson could probably have built a new pole barn almost as cheaply as he fixed up this one, but he wanted it to remain like Cliff built it.  Believe me, his work was cut out for him.  Nobody else would have wanted to fix that old thing, but he wanted it to always be Grandpa's barn.  He was in for some unpleasant surprises.  Once they took off the boards on the front, they found a lot of the wood behind those front panels were also rotten and had to be replaced.  More work!  

So, Thursday and Friday, August 30 and 31, Cliff and Arick tore the boards off the front of the barn.  

Arick's brother-in-law, Aaron, knows a lot about carpenter work and promised to bring a friend with him on Saturday and Sunday who works as a carpenter for a living.  Those two saved the day, because neither he nor Arick is good at the measuring that needed to be done.  Without Aaron and James giving up two days of a precious three-day weekend for us, I don't know how it would have gone.  And all they got for their efforts was a meal I cooked for them each of those days.

Cliff had an easy job that day:  He mostly just sat on the tractor and lifted them or lowered them as needed.  None of his work over those ten days was hard, but I know he was on his feet more during the ten days he and Arick worked on this project that he had been in years.  

So on Monday, Labor Day, it was back to Arick and his grandpa, by themselves.  And they were the crew for the duration.  They've done more painting than anything else.  Cliff had boards on the barn that made white stripes, as you can see on the top picture.  Arick decided it looked fine without those; as Cliff said, it will be easier to paint it when the time comes, without all those white boards on there.  Arick saved the letter "W", though.  Our friend Tom Dent made that for the original barn and he was the one that put it up at the peak.

By the way, there will be a door on the middle part of the barn, an actual garage door; I imagine that will improve the look.  The guys are going to fix sort of a half-door over that opening to the right of the main barn, to cover up from view the precious collection of scrap metal that they use in various projects.  That is where Blue's stall used to be, but Cliff took that out quite some time ago. The section on the very right with the white door is where I milked my cows.

I continued fixing meals for Cliff and Arick through this Saturday.  Now Arick is back to work so maybe he can get some rest from his "vacation".

We had a nice relaxing Sunday; Rachel's family came over, including some grandkids, and we had a nice visit and watched the kids being toted around on the bucket of Cliff's tractor and learning how to drive the side-by-side.  

Good times!