so today is gonna be a big day for doing some work on the barn so it was the
summer of 2016 and I was sitting in the little tiny cafe that we have here in
the center of town I just closed on our farm and became the full owner after you
know kind of a long process of trying to buy the place and I was sitting down and
eating my breakfast when a friend stopped in to the cafe and he said hey I
heard you finally bought your farm you know you have this one portion of the
barn that's about to collapse I'd be happy to try to help you take care of it
and you know make sure it doesn't take down the whole barn so our barn is old
it's like a built in the 1880s 1890s something like that I don't know the
exact date it's huge it's uh three storeys and got a total kind of floor
space of about twelve thousand square feet it was one of the most attractive
things about buying our farm it also proves to be one of the scariest things
about our farm and as I'm sitting there in the cafe eat my breakfast I realize I
don't know anything anything about construction I don't know
anything about taking care of the barn so this friend of mine offered to show
up with a chainsaw and a buddy and take care of the problem I was still living
in Washington DC and so I had to actually brush back later that day to
get into my job that was down in DC and so I said sure and I showed back up at
the farm a few weeks later and when I looked at what had happened I was kind
of horrified he definitely took care of the issue of having the barn collapse
and take down the rest of the barn but essentially all he done was come in and
just hack apart various parts of the footing and collapsed the barn himself
as you guys have probably seen in some of our other videos we've been dealing
with this problem of this collapse portion of the barn he just kind of had
left it there and so when I see this I called him and he was like oh yeah yeah
yeah I'm gonna finish cleaning that up I'll be there any day now this this
process went on for weeks and months and eventually the snowfall came and the
mess was still there and now it's been sitting like that for I don't know about
two years or so the reason I haven't tried to clean it up or clear it out any
sooner is because I didn't know what we were gonna do with the barn and I got to
admit that was probably the best possible decision one of the things I've
learned about owning a farm has been that there's a lot of value in doing
nothing like when I first bought the farm I tried to rush out and do all
these things and change all these things and make things happen immediately and I
got wicked impatient but as I've been here now for three years but I've really
come to learn and appreciate is the more time you spend with a place the more
familiar you are with it the better suited you are to make decisions about
what should be changed or what should be kept the same what sort of things do you
need or what sort of things should you not bother with I actually by accident
did the magical thing of not doing anything through that whole process I
really actually fine-tuned my thinking around what we were gonna do with the
barn so the plan amounted to being we were gonna freeze it in time and keep it
as it is you know we weren't gonna try to do anything fancy with modernizing
the structure what we were going to do is replace the roof fix some
foundational thing fix some beams that were falling apart
and really clean everything up and so that's the course of action that we're
going on right now today my buddy Alfred you guys remember Alfred right find
myself pouring some of my waffles I'm a maple man now if I go back and I
pour a little bit on would be a lot more more generous with the application of my
syrup these days well he's coming by with his
excavator and what we're gonna do is clean up this mess
move it sort some of the stuff take the stuff that we can't burn and bring it
into a pile that'll ultimately take to the dump and take the stuff that we can
burn and put it into a big burn pile and have a nice big bonfire come this fall
so with the excavator unloaded we set out to do some work the process went
pretty well Alfred who's the master excavator
operator just went through and just grabbed everything he was just grabbing
and dumped in and grabbed it and dumped in my buddy Jeff who you guys also might
have known from the video where I put her the Ducks he's also in the process
of trying to start his own brewery here in Vermont actually in st. Johnsbury
Vermont whirligig brewery be sure to check it out he was looking for barnwood
to use as part of the decor of his brewery and so he offered to lend a hand
to in exchange for some wood
getting this mess cleaned up is important it's important for a couple of
reasons first off it's the first step in our
attempt to really reclaim the barn this this mess has always been sort of an
eyesore for the barn and it's really gonna be a first step in trying to
reclaim things Jeff and I tried to help by picking up the sheet metal that we'd
find or breaking apart boards for Jeff's project but there wasn't too much for us
to do who really Moore was on outfit to just keep picking up the stuff moving it
aside picking up the stuff putting it in his dump trailer we would dump it and
clear it out but it's all going a lot quicker than I expected it's incredible
just how much work the excavator can do in terms of just picking stuff up you
know at one point Jeff had said to me you know what do you think they used to
do a hundred years ago when they had to deal with something like this and as I
thought about it I kind of realized there really did it because generally
speaking 100 years ago they would have been focused on trying to keep things
maintained it wouldn't have had this amount of light
I guess that's a indictment of myself but an honest truth
at first it looks like a stick of dynamite no looks like some sort of old
like air pump or sprayer
I am in complete awe of Alfred skills to backup a vehicle and the trailer but
then Alfred challenged me to try to do it too and boy was it embarrassing I'm
gonna try to do it
most of the stuff was cleared out we had built this pile this pile of wood that
is probably 10 feet tall and we're gonna try to set a bonfire this fall in our
town you're allowed to burn once there's snow on the ground and so you know
that's probably only four or five months away in realistic terms and so we've got
it stacked there and hopefully it'll it'll air dry but we had a really good
day just working out there good times hanging out talking while we worked
eventually Alfred Suns showed up and they all kind of hung out with us too
was a good time so we were just cleaning through the rubble and we found this
cattle horn buried in the dirt kind of awesome actually this thing must be 40
years old it's funny it's falling apart but Wow
Wow that's awful you want to keep it okay you can have it when I lived in
Washington DC I often struggle to make friends and
connections you know there's something about living in a big city as a
professional male and you're you know 30s where it's really hard to make new
friends when you don't know anybody it's hard to connect with people you feel so
anonymous you're sort of shuffling between work and home yeah you have your
professional connections but those are professional connections and it's just I
always found it to be really difficult but but one of the awesome things about
living here in Vermont has been just the number of friendships I've been able to
establish and just cool people that I've gotten to know and and you know it was
such an interesting thing to see a day like today where you know here Alfred
was helping me and here I was being able to help Jeff and just this kind of cool
cycle of people working together to get stuff done like you know I always felt
like living in cities things were always so much more transactional but here it's
it's just based on helping friends out and that to me is pretty awesome and
then when you look at what it looks like now it's pretty incredible right I mean
look at this this is beautiful all I got to do is throw down some grass
seed and I'm ready to go I actually have grand visions for this place what I'm
actually picturing is that in a couple of years maybe two maybe three I don't I
don't I don't exactly know just yet but what I want to do is I want to get some
cattle and I can house them right down in there I'll be able to come out be out
on the pasture during the the nice months I can build a paddock right here
and keep them in for the winter and it's gonna be pretty cool just a herd of beef
cows and and it's gonna be right out of this door I can just see it now it's
gonna be the future and I'm just really excited about it really special thank
you to Alfred he's an amazing Mason he's an absolute wizard when it comes to
using an excavator and he's kind of like a mechanical dumble
when it comes to just creating and building things and so if you're ever in
search of some of Alfred's work be sure to check out his website old goat
masonry I'll leave a link right down below show them some love if you guys
can or if you're in northern Vermont and you need some help or even in New
Hampshire he goes out there too and if you're curious about my buddy Geoff's
brewery project be sure to check out whirligig brewery I'll leave a link for
his stuff down below as well you know in the coming months we might actually have
a special secret collaboration between whirligig and Gould Shaw farms so stay
tuned for that and when the appropriate time comes we are gonna have an epic
epic bonfire over here it's kind of incredible what you can accomplish with
just a little bit of help from your friends