Recycling a barn

Chris was looking on Craigslist one day ( what am I saying he looks on Craigslist EVERYDAY) and ran across an add for barn wood. You paid the guy $500 and you could have all the pieces of the barn you wanted,but you had to take it down. So we found out it was a few miles from where we are and thought this was the best chance to get the barn wood we wanted and the tin. Chris' plan is to put the barn wood on the ceiling of the kitchen covering it, put old rusty tin on the living room ceiling ( it will be a vaulted ceiling and reach 16 ft at the peak). We would have loved to get some of the old beams BUT it was too dangerous at this point. The people who own the property said that once they pull it the rest of the way down they would call us to see if we could salvage some beams. We did get several old doors from inside the barn and a few from the exterior. It ended up taking us 3 trips with a loaded 16 foot trailer to haul our treasures. We were able to leave the barn looking like the following pictures in 1 day and 2 evenings of work.

Some of the exterior wood was not worth trying to save.

As a bonus they had a windmill that had fallen over a building and we got it thrown in the deal. I am SO excited about this! I have always wanted a windmill, I did grow up in Kansas after all and it should be required to have one at least once in your life.

She's a little bent but can still be used. We found a place online to order parts for old windmills. Chris has looked into using this as our wind power and is looking into was to convert it to make power for the house. One way is to change the ratio on the turning gears but Hunter and Chris also think that a PTO driven generator ( used on tractors) might be an easier way to make it work for creating usable energy. We shall see. Of course then Chris says if he can't make that work...won't it make an awesome ceiling fan! ( Not kidding he would do it too)

The pile of wood we were able to get.

This is one of the small piles of tin. We were able to get about 150 sheets total.

These are the doors. The big one is from the very top of the barn where they put hay in. The small open gates were in the barn and the other solid small doors were a Dutch style door on the outside. ( those I would like to use to make storage under the stairwell.) If we can't figure out something to do with them int he house I'm sure we can use them in our barn.
We also got a bunch of milled wood from my mom's house. She had a huge oak tree in her front yard loose every branch on it so the tree had to be cut down. Mom had a fiend with a mill and he cut it in slabs to use as the stair treads in the house. The tree measured 44 inches across so we have lots of wood from it. We had thought of making our counter tops for the kitchen out of that same wood but found out it is a pin oak and has too many tiny cracks for that purpose.

Just to mention it....Chris and some of my family members built a gazebo at our family cemetery in honor of my dad. It was made from Locust trees that were cut from my uncle's property and slabs of cedar cut locally were milled to make a bench. I just think it is really neat and we are going to repeat some of the style on the front of our house. ( Plus I just have to show you how creative Chris can be)

Tires everywhere

When we started researching tire foundations we came across many videos on youtube and various other sites. The most helpful site was http://earthship.com/Earthship-Designs/tire-building-code.html because it got more into the details that were needed to do it the right way and the codes involved.  

We dug a trench three foot deep to set the tires in. Chris laid it all out with a builders level before we started digging. Once we started, we found out that there had been an old barn on that same site that had burned and the previous owners had buried it. We had to dig out a ton of trash leftover from the old barn.

Just more pictures of the trench. We picked up tires from a friend of ours who owns a tire shop. He let us pick through his pile of tires that he had to recycle.We ended up with too many BUT we have plans for a root cellar that we will be able to use them on.

Laying out the first row of tires. There will be three rows staggered on top of one another. You have to fill them with dirt, take a sledge hammer and pound it under the lip of the tire,fill some more,pound some more...until the tire does not give under your weight. It takes way more dirt and pounding then I ever thought it would. About 15-30 minutes a tire. ( we put over 400 in the ground)

This saved our backs from all the digging anyway!!

The third row of tires. You fill in with dirt around the sides and compact it too. We did put a laser level on each row to make sure it was in line the whole time.( It still was not perfect but pretty close!)

On of our helpers, she liked to go "dig for treasure" because we kept finding stuff buried in the dirt.

The final row and filling in the gaps.

We started the tires in August and finished in November. With only two (maybe three) people working on weekends and evenings when we could. Most of the time the weather would not cooperate. It was 100 plus degrees or raining it seemed every time we wanted to work on it.