Can't be done. If I wanted to really pull the wall back to true, I'd have to get a few big jacks and jack up the peak of the roof at the same time, to take the pressure off the wall.
Good enough, I decided. Mine would be a crooked barn. At least it wouldn't fall over now.
Next it was time to tackle the rafters. There was a total of 12 of these. Two had to be completely replaced, or else I had to run a double alongside of them "the option I chose. Again I used treated lumber "two 14-foot lengths of beam that I bolted through the good wood I could find in the old rafters.
The other rafters all had varying degrees of rot, but all of it seemed to be near their lower ends, where most of the rain water had settled over the years of my and others' neglect. That made reinforcing them a little easier, but it created another problem: the rot had extended out past the wall to the eaves, which were starting to fall off the barn as a result.
I would have to replace the ends of the rafters, right out to the end of the eaves.
What this meant was bolting new sections of rafter to the good wood of the old rafters, and extending each one out past the wall to the length of the desired eave "about 14 inches.
Once I had done this all the way across the length of the barn, it was time to get up on the roof to start replacing the rotten plywood. But with 1 15-foot drop to the ground from the edge of that roof, I didn't want to be up there without protection, so I had to construct a scaffolding that would both give me a platform to work on at the base of the roof, and a fence strong enough to hold me back if I were to accidentally slide off the roof at some point.
My answer to this challenge was to nail several 2X4 beams horizontally along the inside of the wall, just below the sill beam, and to then cut holes through the wall every four feet large enough to run other 2X4 beams out through them projecting out about three feet from the wall. Inside the barn, I let these latter beams extend about six feet, and then tied them into upright studs that extended from floor to ceiling. These solid horizontal beams would support a couple of 2X10 planks just below and beyond the eaves. I then hung 18' lengths of 2X4 from the ground up past the planks and linked them with several runs of 2X4s to make safety railings. Lower down, I ran cross ties in to the barn wall to keep the uprights from moving inward if the fence were hit, and also diagonally from one upright to the next, to stabilize these "legs of the scaffold.
With the barn structure completely reinforced, I'm now pulling up the rotten plywood roofing and am replacing it with god plywood. I'll cover that with tarpaper and then a layer of 30-year shingles, which should, since I'm 60, guarantee that it's the last roof I have to do in this life.
With luck, I'll have the whole project completed before the first frost.
Saving an old barn is an immensely satisfying activity, even for someone like me with only basic carpentry skills. It also makes one think about other things that need saving and repairing.
Take our political system. The old US political system is, like my barn, shot through with rot and in imminent danger of collapse. We Americans have been busy with our lives for too long, and have allowed the whole structure to decay. Greedy corporations and individuals, like mold and carpenter ants, have infested every post and beam and have been eating them away for years. Now, as we start to become aware of the extent of the rot, many of us are saying that fixing the mess will be just too difficult. Many just turn away and focus on smaller things. Others suggest that just tearing the whole thing down and building something new would make more sense. But I think that given the effort that went into constructing the thing in the first place, we owe it to ourselves and the people who came before us to try and fix it.
That means first of all cutting away all the rot. Corporations deserve absolutely no place in the process of politics and governance. The Constitution refers to We the People, not to We the People and Corporations. Indeed, the whole idea of corporations is profoundly antithetical to democracy. Corporate law was designed to separate ownership from personal liability, and to free owners and managers from personal responsibility for their actions. You cannot have any kind of decent political or governmental system where organizations that are free to act recklessly and without regard to consequences can influence decisions, anymore than you could allow a barn to be built "or repaired "by someone who had no responsibility for the finished project (that's why contractors have to be, or should be, bonded).
It also means thinking ahead in a long-term way. I doubt that I'll be living on this property and owning this barn 20 years from now. If we are lucky, my wife and I will be living in some tropical paradise when we're in our 80s. But I could not live with myself if I just put 10 or 15-year shingles on this barn roof, making it likely that it would start leaking again before long, again putting the long-suffering framing at risk. No, it never occurred to me to do anything less than put the most durable type of 35-year shingle on the roof. In fact, I would have opted for slate if I could afford it.
Yet, in our politics, we Americans keep refusing to think long-term. We refuse to pay for anything, whether it's schools or wars, preferring to borrow for everything, and passing on a country buried in debt to our children and grandchildren. The fiscal soundness of a nation is no less important than the structural soundness of a barn, and we ignore that truth at our, and especially our children's peril.
I fixed my barn myself, but no one can fix this country by her or himself. It's got to be a collective effort.
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