Recycled Roof

Yes, a recycled roof.  I was bragging on my daily (almost) blog yesterday about my environmentally, money saving, recycled roof; but I wanted to wait until today, when I could share it with all of you, even the GSO readers, because this is a pretty good one.  Wow, another sentence that would have my English teacher popping migraine (or worse) medicine!

I have to give you a little background here.  I have mentioned (groan, many times, over and over, you, my dedicated readers say?) that our little piece of heaven, The Royal Ranch, sits at almost 9,000 feet in elevation.  It also sits at the base of two almost fourteeners, Mt. Logan and Mt. Rosalie.  Now, I'm not just telling you that to brag, okay maybe a little-ha!, but we get some wicked winds up here, and I do mean wicked.  

This last winter seemed to be particularly harsh.  We had quite a bit of damage, we lost our historical sign, which I posted about here, and we had lots of little pieces of roofing come off the barn.  Well, I hadn't really noticed that those little pieces had all really added up to one big problem until we got all of this rain.  And then the other day, I went to step inside the barn and sunk six inches into the mud.   Now, I'm no genius, but when you are inside the barn, I don't think you're supposed to be slopping around in mud like that!

So, I get to thinking.  We have tried multiple kinds of regular roofing on this barn and it has not worked because of the tree limbs rubbing on it and the wind tears about anything paper like or shingle like, ie: typical roofing.  Okay what about a tarp type situation?  Now wait, I know you all are thinking, what, a tarp?  Now that's pretty hillbilly.  

But wait, these are the sides and the tops of the old hay barn that the wind took year before last.  It was one of those car port type things you buy at Costco, and it would have worked out great if it weren't for the wind picking up the whole thing, that was concreted three feet into the ground, and throwing it around like a ball of play doh (I told you we got wicked winds!).  It bent all of the poles beyond recognition and tore a few of the tarps, but for the most part the tarps were still in tact, and just awaiting a new life.  I recycled the poles, why not the tarps?

As a matter of fact the buildings themselves are recycled.  My tack shed is a six seater outhouse from a Civilian Conservation Camp from the Depression era that was moved here by Charlie Royal.  And the llama/sheep barn is an old chicken coop that old man Royal built himself.  When we first got llamas, we had our then renter, remove a wall and reinforce it for the larger animals, and voila, a loafing shed ideal for ruminants (which is what sheep and llamas are).

Well, it wasn't exactly me that did the work on the roof anyway.  I don't think any of us would want to know the outcome if clumsy old me had gotten up on that roof.  But Tom did a heck of a job.  He laid the first tarp down and nailed it around the edges, and then a second one over the top, to make sure to cover any of the seams of the first one since these were meant to be walls instead of roofing.  He then sort of wrapped the barn roof like a present, and it looks great.

He also used some wood to reinforce where the wind will catch it.  He just took a long 2x12 and nailed it over the tarps.  It will hold down the tarps and to a certain extent guide the runoff away from the front of the barn.  The great thing about this is that now it is essentially one piece, so hopefully the wind won't catch little bits of it.

While Tom did the roof, the kids and I worked on the drainage around the barn.  I dug a few trenches, not really dug, more like guided the mud, to get as much runoff away from the barn as possible.  We all worked on raking up the loose dropped hay to put in the barn to soak up the mud; so it got recycled too.  Normally I would be able to rake this up once a week and feed it, saving myself quite a bit, but it is all too soggy to use; although I did see the chickens happily scratching their way through it, so that is good.

Back to me and my brilliant ideas, thank goodness I have a husband to help implement all these crazy ideas of mine.  I'll let you know how this one holds up, but in theory it's a good one, and it didn't cost me a dime.  So far we have had some really amazing rain storms and the barn isn't any wetter, which is of course what we were going for!

Sorry folks, I am experiencing technical difficulties, and have been waiting all day to get my links together and post this, but it isn't looking like the problem (within Blogger) will be fixed anytime soon.  So, I shall go ahead and publish without the links, hoping that you will come back and check those out another time!  Thanks for your patience~Judy