the goat barn

The goat barn is slowly coming along. I think I would have been finished, but I am, quite frankly, very scared of the bees nest and of getting stung. Those were some vicious little bastards. I just have no idea what the heck to do about them. I tried to smash the nest standing on the second floor beams, but it just didn't matter--they just went deeper into the manure. I might just have to bite the bullet, cover up very well, and attempt to remove it completely. Before that, though, I will need to remove all the wood from around the barn so I have a quick escape if need be.

I had to clean out the horse barn in order to have a place to stack all that wood, so I spent a couple of afternoons doing that. What a mess. There were like 20 hoses all tangled up in there, along with tons more garbage. I was able to burn a lot of paper and old boxes, which helped, but I still will have at least one dump run in order to get rid of junk.
At least the one side of the barn where I will be storing the wood looks pretty decent now. I'll have plenty of wood, and it will be protected from the elements until I can get around to doing the living room ceiling. Some of the wood is in really bad shape, but I think I'll have enough for that project. I'm still not sure if I want to paint it, but I think if I don't the LR is going to really look dark. Perhaps I can whitewash it like I did with the walls in my bedroom. That lightened up things considerably.


While cleaning out the barn, I found a really cool old gate. Not sure what I'll do with it, but it will come in handy somewhere. I would really like to have an entrance gate to the yard, so maybe I will be able to use that by the pond and the brick path to the house. That would look pretty cool, actually. Hmmm. I like it! There is another very long gate (probably at least 8-10 ft.) that I want to use somewhere as well. If I don't use it as an actual gate, it would make a very beautiful fence for climbing vines. I could just have it standing in the garden somewhere. I love all these old fences.



So here is what the goat barn is looking like now. Lots of clean up work before I can get to the wood that's left, but it shouldn't take too long to actually move it.



I had thought that I was going to burn all of the tree branches in the burn pile, but someone just told me that they had seen a deer fence made up of tons of branches all woven together. That sounds just wonderful to me. That must have taken an enormous amount of time, and I'm trying to figure out how to even start it. I guess there weren't any posts holding this thing up--the branches woven together were enough. I don't see why I couldn't use old 2x4s as posts placing them every 4 ft or so and connecting them with other 2x4's. Maybe I would only need 2 connectors. That way I would have at least something to stabilize the fence, and give the beginning branches something to hang on to. I just can't figure out how else they did it. Maybe the branches were so think that you couldn't see the framing. Doing something like that would certainly be a good way to use up all that wood, as it doesn't seem to be turning out to be a bonfire summer. That's cool. Every summer should be different, and I haven't really even missed the bonfires much. Maybe next summer, with lots of these projects done, there will be more time for socializing. Right now I'm happy to be getting stuff done.