Saving a Sheep Shed that was built in the 1800's... Part 3

We have been working on the old sheep shed turned horse barn, making a little progress here and there through the summer.

It's usable - that's the point of the exercise. It's actually looking like an old barn now, instead of a falling over sheep shed. You can see the first blog posts in the series of the sheep shed save here: Saving an old Sheep Shed - Part 1  &  Saving an old Sheep Shed - Part 2...

The last few months, we've been working on getting the shingles on this north side... 

We're still under $200 cost so far, using our salvaged and hoarded materials. Some rolls of flashing, screws, nails, etc. are the only items we've needed from the hardware store and a little rough sawn lumber for the rafters on the new entrance and to repair a few big holes...

The 'Man-Child' owns an old sawmill and when he went over to saw his own lumber, someone had stolen the old copper radiator and other metal from the old diesel engine. That was heart breaking... There has been a lot of theft going on around here. I don't think the thieves realize that a radiator that old will cost a lot of money to replace, for what little money it brought in scrap. We can't seem to keep anything secure anymore. There is a complete lack of respect of private property in our area lately. We've had a lot of hay stolen, scrap stolen and construction odds and ends. We've had to start locking everything up tight to keep thieving hands from taking what doesn't belong to them...

=(

 

It's really starting to look like a horse barn, instead of an old sheep shed...

  We're still loving the look of this salvaged aluminum roofing. It looks like it's been on this old barn forever and a day and we'll have enough shingles leftover when this project is complete to re-roof the old cellar / coal shed in the back yard that we're turning into a playhouse and storage room. I can't even imagine what it would have cost us to try to roof this old shed with new shingles ~ yikes~!

Reduse, reuse and recycle!

We figured we've saved tens of thousands of dollars using reused material in a lot of our projects around here. This old barn is definitely one of the projects proving what a cost savings recycling can be...

The Man-Child has been packing around a copper cupola since the 80's. It's amazing nobody has stolen it for the copper. We drug it out and put it right above the new barn entrance and it's a perfect fit.

And, it's had some oxidization to make it look old -Yay~~~

 

There's still a long way to go to make this old shed a 'weather tight' barn, but we're quite a ways along...

We got the north side roof near complete and the south side just needs some minor repairs and some light panels installed. Then, we need to patch the south side wall before adverse weather sets in and it should be a good barn for the horses for the winter...

<This has been a ton of physical labor, but a great save ~!>