It's been a busy Spring

[Jim Tressel]

So my brother, Guerilla32, and I have been wanting a barn for a while now.  He has 5 acres or so, works on motorcycles, and has a huge collection of shit that doesn't fit in any normal garage.  I work on cars and have a huge collection of shit that I've somehow stuffed into my garage, basement, and driveway.  Initially we were going to build a barn from the ground up.  He had all the plans drawn up and approved, all permits purchased and so on, then he found a self-storage place in Marysville about 30 minutes from his place that wanted a pole barn gone.  We checked it out and decided to pull the trigger.  It's a 60'x48' Morton pole barn with 22'x16' main door and 2 man doors.  The kit for similarly-sized Morton buildings usually runs around $65,000-$70,000.  He got the guy down to $1,500.  The only catch is that it had to be disassembled and moved in pieces.

Here she is before a single hammer was thrown:






I couldn't resist taking a sweet pic of my car inside on a rainy day with the lights out

[Jim Tressel]

The biggest obstacle in the whole process was that the fucking thing was put together ENTIRELY with ring shank nails.  For those of you who don't know what that is, it's a nail with barbs...making them impossible to pull out.  I ran the numbers and figured there were roughly 1,400 nails holding the siding on, another 2,300 or so holding the roof panels on, 300 or so 7" gutter nails holding the roof stringers to the trusses, and probably another 1,000 or so holding the frame together.  That's alotta nails.  It became immediately apparent that pulling them was not an option, so we switched to cordless sawzalls.  Working from the inside, we tediously cut through all of the thousands of nails we could get to.  It was an enormous pain in the ass, not to mention the hands, forearms, and shoulders.  Before too long, one of the sides came down and the doors came off.  This was no small task.  It was a very stressful drive home with about 700lbs of door frame propped up on a trailer with minimal rigging.



A couple days later, we had 2 walls down.

[Jim Tressel]

There was a week-long pause in the project while I snuck off for the annual Tail of the Dragon trip.  We saw a waterfall and some shit.

[Jim Tressel]

Then Turkley blew up his head gasket on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

[Jim Tressel]

Then on the way home, Turkley got the stomach bug that was floating around and got a hotel room in Kentucky so he could shit as needed.

[Jim Tressel]

10 miles later, the smoke and burning transmission fluid smell came back to haunt me.  I ended up camping out at a gas station in London, KY for 7 hours until Guerilla, his wife and kids, and his truck and trailer came to recover me.  Got home at 5am Monday morning.  The problem became apparent when I pulled the driveshaft.  This isn't a good thing:

[Jim Tressel]

A new driveshaft overnighted from Cali and 20 minutes under the car later, I was back in business.  This meant back to work on the barn.  Here we've got all the wall panels down and Guerilla's up on the roof working on the top row that couldn't be cut from inside.

[Jim Tressel]

Half the roof panels are down and the weather is just barely hold out.  We had to cut out early this day due to rain.

[Jim Tressel]

This is about 8 hours into Sunday a week ago.  This day became a 20 hour marathon to get the roof down.  Work began at 10am Sunday.  We parked the lifts at 6am Monday.

Here we've got the stringers down from the left side.  Due to the previously mentioned 7" gutter nails holding these to the trusses, the only way to get them loose was to use the forklift to push them up from inside.  This was pretty terrifying as I was working on the scissor lift on the opposite side of the barn and every time Guerilla would push a board up, the whole frame would kick back and forth 6-10 inches.  Surprised I'm not dead, actually.

[Jim Tressel]

Around 5:30am, the last truss comes down and gets stacked next to the others. 

We were working with my Ryobi kit and Guerilla's Makita kit.  We had 6 batteries, 2 sawzalls, and a circular saw between us.  I killed the last bit of juice on the last battery cutting through the last bit of the last post on the last truss.  Fucking stressful.

[Jim Tressel]

The only major injury suffered through the whole process was my face.  I was in the scissor lift, knelt down to change blades on the sawzall, stood up and caught my huge (freshly-sunburnt) schnoz on the prybar I had hanging from the control box.  Awesome.

[Jim Tressel]

This is what was left at 6:30am after cleaning up tools and loading the trailer.  The rest of the frame has since come down and Guerilla is going out tomorrow morning with a bobcat to load the trusses on a flatbed.  Done and done.



I went to work all day on no sleep.  I went home at 5:00 and slept for 15 straight hours.  That was pretty cool.  Now we just have to figure out how to put it back together.

[Jim Tressel]

Oh, and then Turkley got married...between two ferns style.

[thrun]

Impressive I would be much to terrified of falling to my doom to get on top of a barn and take it a part.  How much did you end up spending on renting the equipment to take it a part?

[Jim Tressel]

I am terrified of heights, so I did all of the up-high work in the scissor lift.  At full extension, the thing is shaky as shit and took a good long while before I could work with any confidence that I wasn't going to die.  In fact, I think I got vertigo or some shit.  For a couple days after we finished, every time I closed my eyes I felt like I was about to fall over.  I made Guerilla do all the monkey business on the roof, which there actually wasn't much of.

The scissor lift was something like $500 for the 3 weeks we had it and the forklift we only had over the weekend at $300.  The only other real expense was sawzall blades, which are not cheap and we went through a fuckload of them.