I’ve said this before, but homeownership, or should I say farm ownership, is hard work. If something breaks, you have to fix it. If something needs maintenance, it is up to you to care for it. With this in mind I’ve come up with a list of tasks I’d like to do this summer to the house, barn, and workshop.

1. The gutters on the barn. The back gutters on the barn are wooden and completely rotted away. The watershed of the barn’s roof runs right into the barnyard where the goats and chickens live. This makes for a sloppy, muddy mess. It is also slowly deteriorating the walls of the barn by wearing away the paint and staying moist all the time. In order to fix this we will need a long length of gutter and some really tall ladders.

2. The roof on the corncrib. The corncrib is a two story shed attached to the back of the barn. When the previous owners put a new roof on the barn they did not do the corncrib. It will be a nice “small” roofing project that I’ve enlisted my Mom to come help me do. I’ve seen her up on the roofs of various houses my whole life. She also works at Home Depot and knows a lot about home repair.

3. The broken window. We have a broken window in the barn. My mom fixed our last broken window and now we need to learn how to do it for ourselves.

4. Stain the porch. I stained the front steps this past fall and was very happy with the result. I want to stain the rest of the porch to match.

5. Paint the porch. The white paint on the railings of the porch is flaking and needs to be repainted. I figure I can do the project in a short time without any major equipment. We got a power washer for Christmas so this will be the perfect time to use it!

6. Remove moss from the workshop roof. There is green mossy growth on the north side of the workshop roof. It will eventually eat the shingles and ruin the roof. To save it, we need to spray the roof with a special solution.

7. Paint the barn! For anyone who has seen the barn in person, you know it is a massive structure. It will take a lot of scraping, power washing, repairs, supplies, and time to paint. My goal is to paint one side per year for the next few years. By breaking it down into a manageable task I feel like it is less overwhelming.

Our barn:

And now that I’m feeling thoroughly overwhelmed I thought I’d post some pretty barns I found on Flickr. Did you know our barn was originally painted light blue and had hand hewn wooden shingles? We plan to stick to red, but here are some colorful barns others have posted:

blue barn
yellow barn
red barn
orange barn
white barn
green barn
black barn
grey barn

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