Red's New Home
Inside

We've come a long way over the past three months. The major improvements are the floors and detail improvements to the interior. Here's Karen's Mini pulling out into the sun with the yet unfinished gravel floor.

The floor and parking pads outside are now nice concrete. The grarage floor is six inches thick and glass smooth so it sweeps easily. In the picture below you can see the floor drain so we can rinse off the cars or floor during bad weather. The parking pads are brush and edge finish and look really good. The Springer Brothers that did our concrete work are perfectionists and we really appreciate the trouble they took to get everything "Just Right". We've had some pretty serious rains already and everthing flows away from the buildings and off of the hill. Now that the grass is coming in, we no longer have to put up with so much mud being tracked into the barn or the house.

Here are some interior shots of the barn. The sidewalls are 1/2" mylar backed foam with a textured light grey painted aluminum finish on the inside. I think this is an improvement over the fiberglass with vinyl backing that they were using last year. This material looks like drywall material, is taped on the outside to resist air intrusion and seems to work great in the summer keeping the building cooler than being out in the sun. This winter we can heat the building to about 15 degrees warmer than the outside air with four kerosene heaters that you can see in some of the pictures.

The building is divided into three sections, South, middle, and North. The South side is currently the lean-to holding the runabout, the garden tractors and the rest of the lawn, gardening equipment. The South wall of the main barn is reserved for the cars, as you can see in the picture above left.

On the North side of the building is the "shop" area where I'll have room to work on the cars. This area will be divided into both a wood shop and also be able to handle light car restoration, lawn mower repair, well... you know the drill.

The barn is to have a second floor and the access to that area is also on the North side of the building. Currently, the design is to enter through the walk door, and accend five steps to a landing just to the right of the window. Then you turn to the left and acend another five steps to a second landing, where you turn left again and acend the final five steps to the second story. The three rows of steps also define the area of a small bathroom in the entryway area. A door to the shop and garage area will be right between the door and the window to the right of the door.

The shop is pretty much all along the North wall of the building and is somewhat divided by the two windows on the North wall. The workbench is on the North West Corner and is constructed of heavy 2X12 lumber and is stressed to carry about 1200lbs of project. The workbench is not yet finished. I have to add the shelves and cabinets. So far there is only the bench top and peg board installed. The building has a 200amp electrical service and the main breaker box is located right in the middle of the workbench. There will be an additonal 100amp expansion box installed upstairs so that services up there will not be affected by stuff goin on and off downstairs. The building itself has it's own transformer out on the pole and the service lines are underground. There are double outlets on each of the support poles all around the building and in the lean-to. You are never far from an outlet.

When the floor is instaled upstairs I'll install 16 four tube florescent light fixtures for the shop and garage area. right now the garage is pretty well lit during the day from the large windows upstairs on the West wall and the two windows on the East and two windows on the North wall. There are a few lights on switches in the building, but I wouldn't call it bright in there in the evening, but there are plenty of shop lights to play after dark.

When the partitions for the bathroom and stairwell are installed, I'll hook up the water and septic tank to the building. The water lines are already run as is the underground well building complete with it's own manhole cover. I have the only two manholes in our little town. I've found them ideal to create access to both of the wells here on the property.

We will have to come back this Spring and put in the underground pipes for the water and the sewer as we ran out of time to get it done during the Fall, but the grass is in and it appears to have stopped the erosion probems that we had to deal with on the South and West sides of the building during construction. These West Alton farmers know how to manage dirt. Billy had to come back on four seperate occasions to re-work the ground due to erosion. The final time we filled in the area where the old barn had been and cleaned up the final version of the landscaping and planted the grass. In two weeks we had enough grass to hold the soil and have not had a problem since then.

As you can imagine, it's nice to finally get all of the toys in out of the rain. I'm hoping that this will make the paint and interiors of the cars much easier to care for. Everything we currently own can easily be driven in and out of the barn with a minimum of "moving stuff around.

The middle section of the barn is used for the "daily drivers" and the both the Jeep and the Bronco can be parked there without any problems at all. Granted they would have to be moved to get to the other four cars, but that's not a big deal. The middle area is 16' between the poles and there is plenty of room to swing even the travel van out of it's spot.