Barn Demolition

I thought I should take a moment to share my wisdom of barn demolition and salvage.

Step 1- Tie one end of a rope around a vertical timber.

Step 2- Tie the other end to your compact Japanese pickup truck.

Step 3- Pull

Step 4- If Barn is still standing, repeat steps 1 through 3.

Seriously, some barns are not worth the trouble of dismantling from the top down. I read up on the subject before I tackled this job, they suggest dismantling a building esentially in the reverse order you would build it. There was no way you were going to get me up on the roof of my barn, not with daylight shining through in several [hundred] locations.

Not to mention the sagging roof line or the sill plate and posts in the dirt. It seems to me that if the barn were stable enough to dismantle from the top down, there wouldn't be any reason to take it down in the first place.

Several neighbors stopped by to introduce themselves in the proses. Like barn raising, there is nothing like barn demo to bring a community together. I got lots of comments and suggestions to how I SHOULD be doing it. All of which revolved around the assumption that the barn was strong and sound. It just wasn't so. How the heck could I have pulled down a barn, bigger than my house, with a 4cyl Toyota? It was half rotten. Not to mention it had gotten an overhaul  or two in its 120 + years of service, one of which appears to have been a ruthless butchering.

Its too bad though, she must have been a beauty in her day.

Planning a Hunt

I've been toying with the idea of a hunting trip to Long Island in Blue Hill Bay for a year or two. My friend Brian is coming home from Russia for a couple of weeks, and seems interested.

Long Island is a very large island (OK, maybe not as big as the OTHER Long Island, but pretty big), with only a couple of seasonal camps. Like many coastal islands off the coast of Maine, this one has an over abundance of deer. 

The plan would be to launch from East Blue Hill/ Brooklyn, evaluate wind conditions, make a mile open water crossing, and follow the islands shore south, and setting up camp on the south east corner. Depending on the time, maybe just scouting out some good spots, and cooking some dinner. The next day, we will shoot two deer by 9 am and get ready to go home. Ha. That would be nice. Two to three nights might be a possibility.

The only question is, what are we going to use to get over there? We aren't suicidal, so canoes are out of the question. I have one sea kayak, we could rent a second one. I've got an old wooden skiff that needs a LOT of work. All of my other boats fall into similar categories. Looks like its time to acquire another boat!

My Grandfather offered me his tandem kayak he built a long time ago. It should be just about perfect for what we want to do. He designed it himself, with the idea of a very large middle compartment between the two paddlers for a large payload/dog/passenger. It would probably fit two sickley dismembered deer just fine. I plan on heading down to Connecticut to pick it up in the coming weeks.

Operation Free Heat: Success!

Well, it was a slow process, but all the wood for the winter has been felled, bucked, hauled, bucked again, split, and stacked. Next year I'm going to be looking at ways to improve the efficiency of that process. But for now, what I'm doing works well enough.

One one trusty tool I've acquired since my last post is a large garden tractor (actually very small compared to non-garden tractors). Its a 24hp, 4wd, 2-cyl diesel, with a front and rear PTO, category one 3-pt hitch. The previous owner welled up a light "cage" to protect the operator from brush and small trees. It has essential 18 speeds, with the very lowest being virtually crawl settings. Maybe a little better suited for pulling down the barn than my Toyota Tacoma. The tractor didn't come with any implements, so I bought a standard draw-bar (with 2 ball hitches, and a hook), and a carry-all. Both from Tractor Supply Company. The carry all is perfect for how I want to harvest wood from my woodlot.

Being a forester, I'm rather picky about how wood gets cut, so I try to practice what I preach. Low Impact Logging (LIL)has unlimited benefits to your woodlot. Those benefits range from protecting soil and water quality, to maximizing long term economic output of your woodlot. So the process for harvesting your own wood goes as follows:

Fuel for the stove

Well, I would have liked to have gotten this done sooner, but needless to see we have had a lot on out plates. I figured I'd need 5 to 6 cord to satisfy most of our heating needs. We do have oil backup, but I'd rather not use it at all if possible.

I had been a little disappointed when I first discovered our woodlot had almost no hardwood in it. But then I realized I had an abundance of tamarack, and that would do just fine. I plan to supplement that with free waste wood from my logging contractors.

I've never burned tamarack before. To be honest, I personally haven't burned a whole lot of it in my life. We burned a couple of cords a year when I was a kid, but we mostly used coal. I also knew larch (tamarack) was rot resistant. So I figured some of the dead standing trees would be good candidates for firewood, because they are dead, dry, and off the ground. Problem was, most of the dead ones had been dead for quite some time. In fact most even had conks and fungus growing out of them. I cut a small one down, not expecting much. But to my surprise, the center was hard as a rock! The outside ring of sapwood was a little Punky. The way I figure it, once dry, its like a log warped in kindling.

So I decided to try another experiment. The previous owner of the house let the next door neighbors cut a bunch of trees, with he intention of... well I don't know what. Skidding them out with 4wheelers, or a tractor, or ....something? They had cut all of the merchantable wood on their own lot long ago. In any event, they either decided it was too much work or their method of wood extraction fell through because they left a couple dozen (of the largest) trees laying on the ground to rot. Some were Larch, some were spruce, some were balsam fir. I wanted to see if the larch on the ground was as good as the dead standing larch. It was! A little heavier, but still sound in the middle. So as long as they dry in time. I'm all set for winter!