Barn today, Gone tomorrow

 Over at the other property my sister is renting from us was this old barn. Honestly, I have no idea how it was still standing. It's been there as long as I've been here, and Andrea said it was there when she had bought the house years ago. It looked like a stiff whisper blown in it's general direction would cause it to come crashing down. Nope.

Andrea had asked a guy she knew to come take it down before they left for Minnesota. He got busy, went out of town for a while and the barn was still standing when Heather moved in. He popped in a few times, took a few boards and nothing was really done with the barn. So Scott pulled it down.

We rented a dumpster, because that was really the only way to deal with the junk that needed to be drug out of that place. The barn was never going to fit in it though. So after Scott started tearing pieces of the barn down he made a burn pile. Any boards that were still usable, and there weren't many, got set off to the side, and the rest of it got lit on fire. Cause honestly, what hillbilly doesn't like a good bonfire. This one does.

This is what was left of the burned wood when I got home from work. 

Where the barn used to stand

Scott got some really powerful magnets. Like so powerful that I gave myself a blood blister on the heel of my palm messing around with them after I was told I was going to hurt myself. What do you know, I'm an idiot. lol. Back to the magnets though. We duct taped them to the tines of a rake and started pulling it through the burn pile. We filled a whole kitty litter pan full of spikes, nails and random bits of metal. I was amazed by the amounts of iron sand in the dirt around the pile. We still have a little bit to rake through of the original pile, and the whole thing needs to be gone through a few more times, just to make sure.

A week later and it was still hot in the center

There was also a big old pine tree in the dry lot paddock that needed to come down. The horses girdled it last year, meaning they ate all the bark around the trunk of the tree and killed it. Today it came down. Scott climbed the tree with the chainsaw and whacked off a lot of the lower branches. Then he wrapped a chain around it as high as he could reach and attached that to another chain, and then two tie down straps. All that was so I could be far enough away with the tractor to pull on it and not get squashed flat when it came down.

Down it came. 

Scott most of the limbs cut off and Heather and I stacked and burned them. Then he started cutting up the tree for firewood, but pictures of that are going to have to wait for another day. My phone went dead.