The door is installed.

The door is positioned so that we can pour a concrete floor, if at a later date we want a one.  Meanwhile we'll add some road base to bring the floor up and eliminate the gaps at the bottoms of the sidewalls, and add a threshold under the door.

The barn contractor will put on the correct-colored corner pieces soon.  We'll clean out the trash & spare steel panels from inside, and move in the camping pop-up trailer, the dumping trailer, and the tractor.  Carl's stuff, rescued from the flooded storage in Longmont and from his basement, will be moved from the garage to the barn.  I get to park my truck inside again.

And since we don't expect more snow for a few days,  I hope to get the trench dug to get electric power to the barn.  A licensed electrician will install basic service, safely & according to code.  I'll put in lights and outlets myself.  Carl has loaned several fluorescent lights to the project.

21 November - It Looks Like a Barn

Temperature this morning was 15 degrees Fahrenheit, with a couple of inches of snow.  The crew delayed start until 8 o'clock to allow it to warm up; but by 10 o'clock the temp was only 14, and we had snow flurries all day.  A little breeze made it very cold!  They persisted, & competed their phase of the project by mid-afternoon.  While one of the men lives in Black Forest, the other three live in Leadville; they came down to augment the barn company crews during the rebuilding surge after the Black Forest Fire, and now they can move on to other projects.

It remains to install the 18'x10' door, spread more road base on the floor, and run power and Ethernet out to the building.  The door is scheduled for Tuesday.  The outside corner pieces were ordered in red instead of tan, so they will be installed when the replacements arrive.

By the way, the barn is about 130' in back of the house, so one won't ignite the other in a fire.  (According to our fire code, any structure within 100' must be considered when determining whether the home must have a sprinkler system.)

20 November - Cover the Frame

The crew started again at 7 AM.  They quickly finished a little framing, then draped rolls of insulation from the peak down.  It's thin, but is rated at R-10.  The metal roof & siding is 26-gauge steel.The crew split in two, and roof and wall went up simultaneously.

The inside face of the insulation is a plastic film.

By 4 PM both halves of the roof and both sides were done.

Work on the back began, but it wasn't finished by dark.

19 November - The Framework takes shape

First make the side walls stiff.

Then raise the roof trusses.

Tie the trusses into a solid structure.

The crew worked into deep dusk again.  The next morning it was clear that the framework was almost complete.

18 November - Real Construction Begins

At 7:20 AM, while we were still lazing about in our pajamas, the first truck arrived with lumber for the framework.  Most pieces are 16-20' long.

Soon after, a 3-man crew arrived and started laying out precisely the pole positions for this pole barn.

Drilling the post holes was easy on the east side, but in the west side, where the hard clay has settled for millennia, they really had to put weight on the auger.

Meanwhile, the roof trusses arrived on a 41' trailer.  The driver wasn't as good as he thought he was, but after many back & forths, and my moving pallets out of the way for him, and the foreman guiding him, he got the trusses reasonably close to the barn site.

This crew demands precision within 1/8".

They tell me this trailer holds all the steel "skin" for the roof and walls.

End of the first day: