Byron, my father in law, called me just as Rick and I were crawling back to Saskatoon with the first load of barn board to say that he'd just visited another site towards Wakaw. He said that it was worth our time to make the trip and pull off a few boards. So on Thursday night we headed out to the site for a reconnaissance mission.
Apparently Byron had been in contact with the owner and they were willing to give up the siding from a couple of old granaries, but the barn and the original house were off limits. After a quick debate over our strategy (Byron wanted to removing it one board at a time, while I lobbied for cutting out the whole wall, lock, stock and barrel, and taking it back in one huge piece) we decided to take it one board at a time. The boards came off quite nicely and we only lost about 30% in the process.
Let me wax about these boards for a minute...these are the best ones: they're fir, which is most common, they've got the beveled lap and a groove, so they fit nicely, and they also have a beautiful grey sun beaten and sandblasted patina to them. These are boards that you simply cannot manufacture and they bear the scars of 100 years on the Saskatchewan prairies. I would even go so far as to say that they've got soul. Perhaps, a green eyed soul. (www.carriecatherine.com)
By the time we ran out of daylight at 10:00, we'd managed to strip two sides of the building and had a decent load of boards denailed and loaded into Byron's Volvo. Byron, being the sacrificing individual that he is, offered to skip a weekend at Emma Lake to stay back and get a start on installing the barn board.
I'll stop there. The pictures below should tell the rest of the story. Note the beam projecting out of the barn just above the opening for the hay loft. That's from the first load of salvaged lumber.
I'm out the door to return to the site for the rest of our barn board.
C
