Barn Before and After

When my husband was growing up here on the farm, his family had a number of animals. Cows, horses, donkeys, pheasants, geese, goats. . . . However, the barn had sat empty for about 20 years by the time we moved in last summer. Well, empty of animals, anyway. As often happens with extra disused buildings, it became a giant storage facility. This is what it looked like last summer:

west side of the barn

center aisle

east side of barn (current sheep pen!)

What a mess! I began cleanup last fall. First, I sorted all the lumber into piles--to burn as firewood, to keep as potential building material (you never know when you'll need spare lumber!), and to take to the dump.

Hauling burnable wood to the bonfire pile!

After all the wood and random debris was cleared out, we still had to clean. Strewn all over was dust, dirt, old hay, critter nests, a bajillion black walnut shells. . . .

My mother-in-law was such a HUGE help in this whole process. She gamely helped me sort and move lumber. She took load after load of crap to the dump. She even did most of the sweeping one day while I was at work down in the city!

West si-iiiide, all clean! Alpaca will live here.

Center aisle, mostly clean! Just a small lumber pile we'll use to help build the alpaca pen.

The week before the sheep arrived, I set to fortifying their pen. Soays are very small sheep and would've been able to sneak through the panels that were originally built to enclose horses. My sisters helped with this task:

A few days later, my husband and MIL helped me finish the job. Jon and I also built a little hay rack out of an old pallet. The pen may not be the prettiest, but it's safe and secure! And HUGE. The flock can get quite a bit bigger before they'll outgrow this space.

All ready for sheep!

Phew! It was a lot of hard, sweaty work. And we're not quite done--my stepdad will help me build an alpaca pen opposite the sheep pen in the next few weeks. . . . But that's fun work!