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Originally published at Five Acres with a View. You can comment here or there.
Today, I did something I expect I will never do again: I pulled a building down that was hitched to our truck. We went from this:
To this:
and filled a large dumpster. I didn’t really think we could get it done today, and I have rarely been this tired. We salvaged some wood to build a loft in our new shed, but most of the wood was very old and brittle. I am amazed the old barn stayed up as long as it did. (It was partially taken down by a severe wind storm early in 2007, and we decided we didn’t want to try to repair it one more time.) We had been discussing getting rid of the eyesore since we bought the place nearly sixteen years ago, but it was a very useful eyesore.
Before we hitched the truck to the building, Jack first used a sledge hammer to remove everything that looked as though it could provide lateral support to the structure. When the building started shaking as he sledged, we first tried to push it over with the truck. (The Darwin Awards kept going through my mind.) That loosened things up a bit, and the building came down quite readily when we hitched the corner support to the truck. The horses, eating in the next field, didn’t even flinch.
The area enclosed by the panels still needs a lot of cleanup before I can remove them, but at least the dumpster is full, and we won’t have to rent it for more than the one week mininum.