Or what we could do...

Sep 3, 2008 4:32 PM, By Jeff Ryan

Not all buildings were meant to be preserved. If you saw nothing but Roman ruins every time you turned around, they would soon lose their significance and appeal, wouldn’t they? Sometimes it’s just best to throw in the towel, thank a structure for its useful contribution to the world, and then stick a fork in that turkey, because it’s DONE!

We have been faced with that very situation for several years now. An old granary at the other farm has not been used for anything productive for a long, long time. We quit storing oats in a granary sometime back in the early 1980s, I’m guessing. The one we used was at the home place and was torn down to be replaced by a more spacious yard. The one at the other farm has always been a bit out of the way, so tearing it down wasn’t really going to gain us any valuable real estate. We always thought about the removal project, but never did anything about it.

Since we didn’t buy a couple groups of feeder pigs this past winter, we finally had time this summer to move the granary project up the To Do List. Staff member Lorne started by removing the tin from the lean-to on one side. Then he removed the roof and an addition on the other side. It made the base of the building look easier to get rid of when it was whittled down to size a little bit. We were looking at a building that was almost a 20-foot cube. It was about 20 feet wide, 20 or 24 feet long and it seemed like it was 20 feet high. At least, that’s the reasoning I used to keep me from going up on the roof to remove any tin. Heights are not my thing. The same goes for Guy No. 1.

Here was the engineering brainstorm behind the building. Concrete walls approximately 6 inches thick ran the length of the building. Each one was about 6 or 8 feet apart and stood about 3 feet high. The wood portion of the building rested on concrete foundation footings. The quality of the wood was still pretty good, but probably not good enough to make any Amish dudes want to tear it down for us. Once the building was gone, then we could have some demolition fun and get rid of the foundation. That would open up some space.

Call it reflex or force of habit or whatever you want, but Guy No. 1 and I had the same initial thought about the removal of the building, which involved three steps. Step 1: Light a match. Step 2: Step back. Step 3: Watch that puppy burn.

1, 2, 3, done. Simple Two Guys Farming math.

Of course, we’re not total pyromaniacs. Well, we are, but we still have a bit of a practical streak in us. Perhaps we can credit the German ancestors for that. As fun as a fire would be (and that was the Irish in us talking), it would still leave us with one significant downside. We couldn’t get the fire hot enough to melt all the nails in the building. We’d be puncturing tires for years to come if we burned it and didn’t take out a hundred dump truck loads of the remaining nail-laden ground and replace it with 125 loads of dirt from the field. You really can’t move dirt in July without doing some serious damage to those cornstalks calling it home at the time.