This Old House

The barn, aka the garage, aka the shed, or whatever you'd choose to call it, which extends as a kind of funky, antique add-on to our old, old house, has been in disrepair for some years.  We've not ignored it, exactly, but it's not the sort of repair project that we could get truly excited about-- after all, it's just a barn. Also, the barn is chock full of stuff left over from years and years of collection (what do we do with this?  -I dunno, let's put it in the barn) some of which, just to defend ourselves for a moment, isn't even our detritus. 

Last year though, Lionel finally made the leap from the potential (yeah, we should do something about that) to the actual (hey, I found somebody to work on the barn!) and we were set to clean out the detritus in a moment's notice, so that we could finally rest easy under the roof.  The contractor said he'd be there in September.  Of course, he lied.

So we spent all of last winter nervously eyeing our barn roof and the ever accumulating snow, listening to reports of roof collapses with growing trepidation, until spring came and the snow melted and the contractor, that slippery eel, told us for sure he'd come in May.  Luckily for us, we found another contractor who said he could start that week.   

So now we're in the midst of Barn Renovation, which as I feared started out as a simple project, shoring up the front of the building (and incidentally building a new bay for Daisy) and has now morphed and traveled its way to the back of the building.  The good news is that this has been forcing us to, if not actually deal with the detritus in the barn, to schlepp it around.

Which is how we found one entire corner of the barn to be propped up with haphazardly stacked cement blocks, in a true display of Swamp Yankee ingenuity.  That's right, the entire weight of the barn, the entire fate of the barn, rests on five skewed cement blocks.

Sometimes, it really is better not to know.