This Old Barn

[quicksandfarmer]

After getting the floor beam shored up I could work on supporting the hay loft on that side. Originally there had been eight posts between the floor beam and the beam that supports the hay loft. They held up that beam, and also served as dividers between the nine dairy stalls in that end of the barn. Those posts had been gone for decades when I came on the scene. They had been replaced by a motley collection of uprights that were landscape timbers from a big box store, not even proper posts. When I hoisted the loft at the beginning of the project they fell away with disturbing ease.

The beams had matching mortises to show where the tenoned posts had been. I was able to buy rough-sawn timbers from a local sawmill. (On the southeast corner of my property is an old family cemetery with a handful of graves, they have the same family name as the mill that I bought the wood from). I cut new posts and cut tenons into both ends. At the bottom I cut the tenons as deep as the mortise, but at the top I only cut them about 3/8" deep. At each post I put the new post in at the bottom, then used a post jack to spread the beams enough to slip the top in. At times hammering and cursing ensued. Where I had replaced a section of the bottom beam I didn't cut new mortises, I just toe-nailed the beam. For those posts I could put a deeper tenon in the top and then swing the bottom into place.

While the mortise and tenon joints aren't visible once the post is in place I believe it makes the beam stronger to have the mortises filled.

Here's a picture of the completed posts, which I learned were called "stanchions."



The center stanchion is missing. At some point a notch was cut into the beam there, I don't know why. I'm still trying to decide whether and how to deal with that.

Once the posts were in place I relaxed the chains a little, letting the weight of the loft settle onto the floor beam. When I had first repaired the beam it seemed almost a little flimsy, shaking under my feet. With some weight on it feels very, very solid.

 

[sodamo]

Thanks for sharing this great project

 

[Wagtail]

... the completed posts, which I learned were called "stanchions."

The center stanchion is missing. At some point a notch was cut into the beam there, I don't know why. I'm still trying to decide whether and how to deal with that.

Once the posts were in place I relaxed the chains a little, letting the weight of the loft settle onto the floor beam. When I had first repaired the beam it seemed almost a little flimsy, shaking under my feet. With some weight on it feels very, very solid.

"Stanchion - an upright bar, post, or frame forming a support or barrier.
Origin
Middle English: from Anglo-Norman French stanchon, from Old French estanchon, from estance ‘a support’, probably based on Latin stant- ‘standing’, from the verb stare."

I remember first hearing the term during Navy 'damage control' training; using 4x4" 'Oregon pine' timbers +wood-wedges to construct braces on doors or hatches.

 

[oosik]

What a beautiful barn. What a wonderful project. What a lot of work. The original 1890 homestead buildings are gone now, here. The first building was what I would call "multi purpose". It was the original house for the homesteader and his wife. It was also shelter for his chickens and sheep. The hay was stored on the upper floor of this building. Those were the days of "sharing". Then came the very simple homestead house. Then a separate building for the chickens. The original multi purpose building became shelter for the sheep and hay storage. I DO have a very few pictures but they are the old B&W's and aren't very clear. They are exceptionally small - 1.5" x 1.5" - by todays standards.

It's easy to see why every little addition was greatly appreciated in those days. They had so very little that we would now call luxuries.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

I found an article that describes what the milking parlor would have looked like when it was in use:
The Milk and Human Kindness: Plans for an Old Style Wooden Stanchion Floor – Small Farmer's Journal

The eight cow tie-up at Goodrich 4 Corners was built into the east side of the early (1789) English barn hewn from hemlock and chestnut, and set on the customary dry stone foundation. Because it had to be built into the existing timber frame with its own proportional and structural constraints, the ceiling height is rather low, doorways quite low, requiring most adults to bend when crossing the threshold.

It was a long rectangular room running the length of the gable end of the barn which stood very close to the road. It was probably built around 1920, by a man skillfull with chisel and saw, and it was sheathed in tongue and groove pine, planed, the trim and detail better than many modern house interiors. Windows all along the outside wall, waist high, and white washed floor to ceiling, this white wash being renewed semi-annually in accordance with the law for cow houses in former times. It was thus, bathed in light. For the first four years I had that farm, Clayton Warner, the last whitewash man used to come and spray the barn for me – we’d spend a good two days sweeping and scraping it ready – he’d come over the mountain through Middlebury Gap, and he wasn’t hurrying, had an old Chevy truck with a tank of white wash on the back.

The photo in that picture looks very similar to my barn. The door is almost exactly the same, you can see it in the first picture I posted in the thread.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

It's easy to see why every little addition was greatly appreciated in those days. They had so very little that we would now call luxuries.

They had very little in the way of what we could now call necessities! They were living in New England in the winter, heating with wood. They were producing milk with no running water or electricity. In the winter they would milk in the dark with no electric light.

About 100 yards to the east of the barn there is a pond. I have a neighbor who is 83 and farmed in the area his whole life. He believes the pond was hand dug, for ice. This area didn't get electricity until the 1930's but people were in the commercial dairy business in the 1850's. For decades they kept their milk cool with ice that they cut in the winter.

Last summer my teenage son helped me put up a few hundred bales of hay. When we were done, I said to him, "How would you like it if every year you spent July and August putting up hay and January and February putting up ice?" He thought about it for a moment and said, "I bet you'd get really good at stacking things."

 

[mark02tj]

THANKS for documenting this! Fascinating thread!!

 

[Ken45101]

Very nice! You are fortunate to be able to find the historical data on it! I have a 36x48 barn with hand hewn beams and mortise and tenon construction. There is one 12"x18" beam that is 36' long! I have no idea how old it is. The farm has been here since 1820. One of my challenges is figuring out what is structural and what was added on to support hanging tobacco. The tobacco rail supports are in the way of using the upper areas. I'm not sure if any of it lends structural support.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

There are two main beams that hold up the floor. I've already told you about the work on the eastern one, now I'll talk about the western one. The beams run north to south and divide the floor into thirds. There are also two smaller beams that run east-west between the main beams and divide the middle third of the floor into thirds (or ninths of the whole floor). In the middle third the floor joists run north-south, and in the outer thirds they run east-west.

The west beam had the only intact suspension rod. Here's a picture of it, from below:


The main beam is running top to bottom in the picture. The suspension rod is the rusted square nut with backing plate in the middle of the picture. Coming in from the right is one of the smaller beams that connects to the other main beam. You can see two of the post jacks I used, each with a piece of treated 2x8 to cushion the beam.

The other suspension rod on this beam had failed, although the beam itself was intact. At some point someone had planted a piece of 4" cast iron pipe vertically in the basement of the barn below the suspension point, and that was holding up that end of the beam. While this suspension point was intact, the beam had sagged 6-8 inches at both points. There's a good chance this happened when the shift was made to baled hay. The loft was built for loose hay, baled hay is 2-3 times denser and the load in the loft would have increased considerably the first time it was filled with baled hay.

I used four post jacks to raise this beam. I put one near each suspension point. I also put one under each cross beam. The cross beams have tenons that go into mortises in the main beams, I was worried that by lifting the main beam alone I would stress and possibly damage the joint. I put the post jacks in place, cinched each one snug, then got a big wrench and started turning. I got the end that was on the pipe to lift off of the pipe. And then nothing happened. I was tugging pretty hard on that wrench, and the jack wouldn't turn. The screw in the jack has seven threads to the inch, and the wrench was about a foot long. The end of the wrench travels 6.28 feet for each revolution of the screw; to raise the jack one inch the wrench travels 44 feet or 527 inches, so my mechanical advantage was over 500 to one. I'm not the strongest guy, but I figured I'm capable of putting 50 to 100 pounds of force onto the wrench, so at that mechanical advantage I was putting thousands of pounds of force into the beam, and it wasn't budging.

So I decided to leave it for a couple days. When I came back, I tried again and the wrench turned easily -- for about 3/4 turn -- then nothing doing. So I came back a few days later, and I repeated the process. Over about a year and a half I turned it a little bit every few days, over and over until I had lifted the beam 6 or 8 inches and it looked level and straight. I'm still not sure if it's exactly straight or level, all I have is a 4' level and the wood is rough enough that it's hard to tell. But when I stand back and eyeball it against the top of the foundation it looks pretty good.

Right now I still have it up on the post jacks and I'm deciding what to do. The one intact suspension rod is sticking up about six inches up in the top of the hayloft. I'm going to have to put a post there, probably a 6x6. What I'm thinking I'll do is cut a section of 6x6 maybe a foot long and run it horizontally along the bottom of the beam, with a notch cut in it to allow for the bottom of the suspension rod. The post would then tie into that piece of 6x6. At the other end I have to decide whether to remove the cast iron pipe, or leave it and use it. If I use it I have to figure out how to tie it to the beam, before there were just a few pieces of scrap lumber which tended to shift. Removing it is going to be a chore as it's set in concrete.

I'm also thinking of putting some sort of modern steel beam hanger on the beams to reinforce the mortise and tenon joints.

This work was done at the same time as the work on the other side, I didn't join the cross beams to the new east beam until I had this end level. Once I had it all connected I had the four main beams of the floor all level and supported and I could start working on the joists.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

With the beams all squared away it was time to start working on the joists. Near the center of the barn there is a trap door that was used to shovel manure into a wagon in the basement. It's roughly 4 feet square and has a doubled joist on each side and a header joist on each end. The header joists are tenoned at each end and go into mortises in the double joists. A previous owner had driven a tractor over it and broken the double joists on one side.

The joists are 3" by 7" and roughly 28 feet long. The are supported by two beams spaced a third of the width of the floor. Where they cross the beams each joist is notched. The joists are about 21" on center. (Nothing in the barn is on 16" centers or even multiples of two, most dimensions seem to be prime numbers. I can only conclude it was built by numerologists.) I had to replace two joists. Since I can't get 28' pieces of lumber any more, I cut the joists to be replaced where they crossed the beams, and only replaced the section between the beams. A modern 2x8 is 1.5 by 7.25, so a doubled 2x8 just about exactly matches the 3x7 joists. So a quadrupled 2x8 was needed to replace the doubled old joists.

I used post jacks to support the header joists, then cut out and removed the broken joists. I didn't take pictures but they had snapped all the way through, they came out in pieces. I then cut notches on the ends of the replacement joists so they would sit on the beams, and cut mortises into all four joists to match the tenons on the header joists. The way I cut the mortises was to hold the first joist against the tenons and trace the outline, and then trim until it just slid onto the tenon. Once I had one good I copied the pattern to the other three joists. As I put the new joists in I nailed them to each other with 16d nails. Once the replacement joists were in I removed the post jacks.

Here are a couple of pictures of the finished product:




The underside of the floor doesn't look too bad in the pictures, but it's actually in rough shape, missing a number of boards and layers of patches of varying quality. When the joists are all fixed my plan is to take up the floorboards and put down a new floor.

I'm not sure what to do with the trap door, right now I just have a piece of Advantech over it.