HOW EAGLE AND BEAR BUILT THAT BARN
(Page 2 of 3)
May/June 1972
By Krishna Eagle
Bear and I began construction by setting our frame uprights in place . . . one at each corner and two spaced evenly along each wall. We originally planned to bury the ends of the uprights three and a half feet into the ground and support them with footings of rocks and old bricks . . . but when we dug the foundation holes we hit water at two and a half feet. That changed our plans and we had to bury the poles two feet deep instead, on a base of six to ten inches of bricks and stones. This was somewhat unfortunate since we had rot-proofed the bottom three and a half feet of the uprights with creosote before we started digging . . . which meant that well over a foot of goo-covered pole stuck out of each hole. We discovered later—after moving our tenants in—that the goat loves to eat the bark off the timbers and black sticky creosote all over Rebecca's once—clean white coat is a nuisance. So next time we'll know to "dig now, creosote later".
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After getting all the vertical poles set and the holes filled, we nailed the horizontal timbers to the uprights at loft-level and laid the mow floor supports across them. Every nailed crosspole lent a little more reassuring stability to a decidedly wobbly frame.
Next we put the ground floor joists down and placed the sill logs on top, snug against the uprights. The sills, which were nailed to both the joists and the uprights, would provide a base for the wall poles.
By this time we should've had a cube, but since we had only eyed the uprights into place, the walls weren't truly straight. I understand now—from reading HOW TOBUILD YOUR HOME IN THE WOODS by Bradford Angier—that triangulation methods exist for getting square corners and straight walls, but at the time we didn't know about them.
Our next step was to carefully climb up on the shaky loft support poles and saw the uprights to the proper lengths to give the right slope to the roof . . . 12 feet high in back, 13 and 14 feet along the sides and 15 in front. The easiest way to get the correct slant is to stretch a string from the 12-foot pole to the 15-foot pole and mark the two intermediate poles where the cord crosses them. This method sounds simple, but it took us quite a while to come up with it!
Once all the uprights were cut to proper length, we added the four roof supports north to south along the tops of the vertical poles and tied them together with crosspoles running east and west across the front and back walls. This finished the frame and, surprisingly, gave it enough support so that you didn't wish you were on the ground (too much!) when climbing around in the loft. At this point we put in horizontal poles to frame the tops and bottoms of the windows. . . and that completed our work for the day.
The next morning Bear and I went out to nail on the walls . . . and bang! . . . the ground was covered with snow .. Winter had caught us with a heckuva lot still to do. After spending a couple of frosty days putting up the walls, we chinked the spaces between the poles with wild hay and moss (found hanging in huge chunks from alders in this neck of the woods). Bear took another day to put down the cedar plank ground floor on joists set two feet apart while I was busy up above laying small poles side by side for the loft floor.
