Barn Spruce Up Part 6

I will bring you up to date on other projects before I get to the barn spruce up.

The great driveway scrape off continues.  I had a large open sore on my finger from the shovel handle sliding along my ring finger.  There must have been a rough spot on the handle but my finger has healed and today I was back to scraping the driveway.

Hopefully two more days and that particular project will be completed.  The expanded driveway will come in handy for parking the snow plow and the extra truck.

The retaining wall is installed and today we picked up three tubes of adhesive to glue the cap block in place.  After that is completed, I can then back fill behind the retaining wall.

We also have started installing the new cedar shingles on the small wall where the gas meter and the furnace exhaust pipes (2) are located.  Lots of special cuts that make the installation move at a snail's pace.  But it is tasks such as these that must be done correctly or the whole job looks bad.

You might notice that the shingles are slightly lower than the corner boards.  Once we are done with the shingles, R will cut them off.  The sheathing etc was lower than the corner board.  By waiting until afterwards we can make sure that the rows line up with the rows on the next wall.  Right now if you put a level on the bottom of those shingles it will show that they are level so we will actually cut them slightly askew.  It's a bummer but when dealing with a nearly 100 year old house you will find parts that are not straight or level and you just have to deal with it.

R informed me that we have to leave the electrical conduit because there is just not enough space (12 inches max) in the crawl space for him to maneuver.  I'm hoping that when we straighten it and repaint it that it will no longer stick out like a sore thumb.  Fingers crossed because right now my eye is drawn to it every time that I look in that direction.

On to the barn......

I cannot remove anymore paint on the south side of the barn until our new ladder arrives so I moved to the east side (back).  Scraping is more difficult because the wood is quite weather checked and the paint is not as thick.

I've removed the paint halfway up the wall so now it's back on the ladder.  My feet won't take as much of a beating since I will only be on the third rung.  It's a killer when you are at the very top of the ladder because you can't just step off when your feet start to hurt.

We used chalk to marked all the holes and rough spots and then used a universal epoxy to fill them. When the paint removal is complete we will give the barn a light sanding to remove any loose material and sand down the filler.  The barn will not be perfect but it will be a huge improvement over it's current condition.

We also picked up the 1X8's that we will install as fascia boards on the exposed rafters ends.  After we paint we will install eave troughs.  This will help with the rain water pouring off the roof and give us a lot of free rain water to water our plants.

Speaking of plants.  The end of the year sales have started and I've picked up about a dozen plants on sale.  I wasn't the only person buying sale plants, either.  There were two other ladies that had carts loaded with 50 or more plants.  That's a lot of planting!!!