Hello chickeners - fun to read all your updates. I'm hoping y'all will have more birds to downsize once I'm actually ready for some.
We've had more people out to look at our buildings, and the sad sad news is that it's looking like we'll have to take our barn down. (I may have shed some tears yesterday.) We're being told that it's going to cost a lot more to refurbish it than to tear it down and start fresh. Unfortunately, the (stone) foundation under the roof hole is too damaged for anyone to work on the top of the structure without doing substantial foundation work first.
It's expected that we'll be able to keep most of the beams, as well as pull other materials to keep. However, due to the structural issues, an organized removal of material would be costly. I'm guessing we could get one of these barn companies that reuses the materials to come out and do it for less, but then we wouldn't get to keep any of it ourselves. We've also been advised that having any random people come pull materials would be a great financial risk due to liability concerns.
Our white silo needs to come down asap. All parties agree that it should be dealt with promptly from a risk standpoint. The trees growing in front of it have been further chopped down from the pic below, and it really is in bad condition. That black spot about 5 ft off the ground is a much larger hole than you can see here - at least 5 ft wide, and with another smaller hole on top of it.
And it's looking like 2-3 other smaller buildings will need to come down, that we'll be able to do ourselves. So, by winter our little place could be looking a lot different.
The long-term plan would be to rebuild a barn of some sort, but I don't know how soon that will happen. Luckily, the chicken house is determined to still be in good shape; but we were told we should start removing overgrowth around it asap as well. Apparently it has a slate roof! We had no idea. DH was told we have so much overgrowth around the barn and the chicken house because they were well used and the manure made everything grow like crazy once the maintenance stopped.
DH is making plans to rebuild a garage I can actually park inside in the location of the building on the far right below, using some of the beautiful red weathered wood from the building on the far left, which has collapsed roof beams and overlaps a drainage easement. That should be good, I guess. Though I kind of like the little non-functional garage that's there now. I imagine he'll put up the new one next summer.
Also, we have a large tree to take down. We are getting sap raining down on our cars/driveway/front porch constantly - which is annoying because of dirtying up our cars, but also concerning because the bees and ants like it. There are two trees together, but we think it's the willow that's dripping all the sap. We have bees crawling all over our cars and other misc things out there all day. They are not agressive, but it seems like a dangerous situation waiting to happen, considering our little kids, as well as other guests with health/mobility issues.
