When the property was purchased, it was an abnormally dry summer that year. The barn looked good enough from an I.T. Geek perspective - it had solid four by fours holding up the structure, a tin roof that looked okay (but needed work) and it was painted red. You know, the normal barn that comes to mind when you think of an old red barn.
This is what it looked liked when purchased:
Well, looks can be very deceiving, especially if you don't really know what you are looking at. Apparently the barn was built some fifteen or twenty years ago on a lower spot than the land that makes up the pasture. Not a huge deal, it only floods when it rains, right? In Florida, it rains quite a bit.
The dots were not fully connected until it actually rained for the first time as a farmer. After the initial hurricane-like rainstorm, it became abundantly clear that much work was needed on the barn and the land around it.
Seriously, the flooding was horrible! The fence that the tree fell on in the below picture was brand new fencing.
Had the true state of the barn been known early on, it would have been torn down and a new one built in another location out of the flood plain.
To fix the problem in the near term, a canal was dug around the barn to shed the water away from the structure and several truck loads of fill dirt were placed inside and around the barn to raise the height of the dirt floor.
Now, five years later, the barn is in use and stays dry (for the most part) when the torrential spring and summer rains come to North Florida. Cows, pigs, goats, chickens, ducks and turkeys have made the barn their comfy home.
With all the work done to raise the dirt floor a couple of feet with fill dirt over the past few years, the time, money and effort could have been used to have a new barn built.
A new barn is still in my Farm Girl Freak dreams ...
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