The project started in January of 2011 and the last photos are from June of 2011. Here's the original barn. It sit's about 100 yards from the house I rent. Mortise and tenon construction. Lots of 6x6 and 6x8 beams in there. Measures about 32' x 50'. All southern yellow pine. Built in 1892. Landlord was gonna knock it down and burn it cause the roof had rotted out and he doesn't have the kind of money it takes to save buildings that have little or no use to him. I asked if I could gut it for whatever I could get and he agreed.
Shot of the interior as I was pulling out the loft supports. That's Mr. Marbles the Boxer mutt supervising.
Shot of the little brother helping cut out the hay loft floor. I'd been using a reciprocating saw up to that point. He sacrificed a garage sale chainsaw for the cause. It definitely was faster but hard on the saw.
Loft floor out.
Queens trusses removed. They built these old barns pretty stout she still wasn't showing any signs of sagging even with all the supports removed.
Here's where a portion of the salvaged wood went. Started building a loft in my brother's garage. We built it full width of the garage, 24 feet, and 13+ feet deep. The back 10 feet will be a storage area for motorcycles, and the front 3+ feet will be a display area. That center support post (the one painted white and green) is at 10 feet from the back wall.
Elevator was built from a salvaged electric forklift. Rigged an electric motor to run the pump. It was rated for 3500 lbs on the forklift. Don't think we'll ever get that much weight on it at one time. We control the valves with a cable system, you ride the platform up with the bike.
Little brother's Ural up on the loft.
Back to the barn. Started pulling out the support posts with the 5 ton 6x6 in the background. The barn even in it's stripped out state put up a heck of a fight. Broke one chain a D-ring and 5 seperate 3/8's inch cables that day before we got it on the ground.
After it was on the ground I attacked it over two weekends, and stripped out every piece of usable wood. Got a heck of a pile of it in a shed at my other brothers farm, saving it for future projects. Anyways back to the loft.
Built the wall to seperate the storage area from the display area with a door in between.
Elevator and floor painted up.
Inside of storage area. As you can see the height of the truss makes it kinda difficult to get bikes into the diplay area, but it can be done with a little finesse.
And here's the completed loft, with a few barn bike finds, and some trinkets we found on the farm and in the barn in the display area.
Hope ya'all enjoyed the show.
TDF
