Married to the Tin Man

It’s actually metal siding but we keep calling it tin. Since May, my husband’s been working on building a pole barn. It’s been a work in progress, especially when the project took a hiatus during haying season.

He and our son worked on it until he felt like he was at a good stopping point before hitting the hay fields and didn’t resume until late August.

While out in the hayfield he’d had enough time to plan out his next move and once the hay was put up, got back to barn building.

Even when he was busy with other ranch work, the barn building never left his mind. Some nights he couldn’t fall asleep because he was busy planning and building the barn in his mind. One time when he was particularly worried about getting his poles and the finished barn straight, he dreamt that the barn turned out severely crooked.

Since he’s more of a welder than a carpenter, some of the stages of his barn building required a lot of thought and planning. It helped that friends and neighbors gave him a hand once in a while and helped him figure out how to put his plans in place.

From the beginning, he wasn’t sure what he was going to do about the doors because he didn’t want them to slide open like our shop doors do. He wanted them to swing open so they could also be used to block alleyways when getting a cow in the barn. Since there was plenty for him to worry about throughout the whole thing, he pushed the door project aside to worry about when the time came, which it did.

Once his industrious mind got to work on a solution, he came up with a resourceful and sturdy door idea using some of our old cattle panels, which I thought quite clever.

He used his welding skills to figure out how to make latches to open and shut the doors.

With the doors in place, we’ve started using the barn; first to lure all the barn cats out of the shop and up to their new home and to store grain and square bales for the bulls and horses.

Every time I walk in the barn, I’m amazed how big it feels compared to our old one. With a calving start date of February 24th, it won’t be long before we’ll be testing out our new calving barn. It might be the onlytime my husband and I will ever be anxious to for calving to start. I’m curious how differently calving will go this spring. One thing’s for sure, I’ll be glad we won’t be using this barn anymore.

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