Where we started

Here's a glimpse of where we started, right after we got this idea last November.

Until then, my husband and I had been planning on building a new house on my parents' farm. We spent long hours on many evenings discussing how we could do it, discussions that were exciting but also exhausting and frustrating. There were so many options, and so many of the things we wanted to do would take up too much of the budget that we had.

We went to visit my family right after Thanksgiving, and while we were there, I made a joke that we could always just renovate the granary. Neither Dave nor I took the idea seriously.

But later, Dave came back after a walk and said, "That granary is solid!" (Of course, if we'd been thinking about it before, we'd have realized that it had to be strong to hold the weight of all that grain.) And added that we needed to think about that some more.

So we did, and we took some pictures, and we showed them around to different family members. And I think some of them did think we were a little crazy, but others were intrigued by the idea.

Here are some of the pictures we showed them:

Here's the granary, as seen from the front of the farmhouse (looking northeast). There's a good-sized artesian pond directly to the north of the building. The building just to the east used to be a hog house but was later converted to a tractor shed.




This is view of the granary's north side. The siding was water damaged years ago, and it was replaced with tin. The small buildings to the left are a woodshed and the old-fashioned Finnish sauna.


This is the view of the interior. It's roughly divided into thirds: the west and east thirds were divided into bins that held grain, and the center third was an alleyway where a truck could be parked to unload the grain. The center alley was about a foot lower than the floors of the bins on either side. The granary hadn't been used for years, since my father and uncle had quit farming; the man who now rents the land and buildings thought that scooping out grain by hand, as my dad and uncle had done for years, was too much work. So it was used for storage. (And yes, we did decide we'd have to evict the "coyotes" before we moved in. That's our dog Blue in the foreground.)


A look up at the rafters.

The grain chute. Grain could be put from a truck into the granary via an auger that fed into this chute.


Here's a view looking down, toward the big sliding doors on the south side.
This line, with the year "1959" in my uncle's handwriting, showed how high the grain came up in that bin in that year. My guess is it was a good year.

That's all for now. I'll give an update on where we are now next time. This is going to be a little piecemeal, since I want to tell parts of the story that have already happened but I really don't want to lose sight of what's happening right now--so I'll do my best to give the current update first, then go back to past events. But that starts next time.