For the past six weeks I've been working on building a barn. Every spare minute has been spent outside (meaning as soon as I get home from work, I'm outside until it's too dark to see). It's been a fun project and I'm close to finishing up.

Here's some (a lot) photos of progress.

Our chickens should be happy. I just finished building and designing their new coop. Now it's only missing a rooster weathervane. I'm on the lookout for a good price on one because that's the only rooster we'll have!

It's only been a few months, but Julie and I found it quite interesting and enjoyable to look through the "before and after" photos this weekend of our house. As you know it took a lot of work to restore our last house, and I often find myself wishing we had taken a few more photos during the process so we had more than just what we had to start with and what we ended up with.

For your enjoyment I've compiled a not-so-brief photo documentary with narration of our work-in-progress below.

Here's what we started with:
And here's what we have now:
We started work in the yard first (as yard work doesn't cost anything (except broken chains and tractor parts!)). Here's a panorama of the rear section of the backyard (you can click on the photos to see them larger):
After pulling out countless number of trees and bushes it started to look much nicer:
But some things had to go, like the shrubs lining the back of the front section of the backyard and the Box Elder tree at the end of the row:
 After removing them it was much easier to access the garden area:
So you may be wondering where we put all this junk by now. Well the answer is burn piles, and lots of them. Here's the first of many:
 It didn't take long for the piles to grow, so it was time to start burning. Here's our first, of many, fires:
After burning all day long we finally made a dent. Once all the piles were gone it was time to make more,
so the yard could start to look like we wanted it to:
And with a little more work:
Now that the garden was planted and growing, along with the six new fruit trees, it was time to give some attention to the house. The inside is quite dated, but will require some time and money to do more. One of the first things we did was purchase new light switch and outlet covers to replace the old ones:
The new ones were chosen to match and accent all the beautiful windows and plantation shutters:
This:
became this after pulling out a bunch more trees and shrubs:
Unfortunately, we weren't able to burn all of the plants pulled out this time, some were just too big and required a trip to the dump. Yes, we burned a 50 foot tall Box Elder tree, but we couldn't burn a 25 foot tall bush (I tried, remember. The police came along with half the neighborhood and a bunch of students from the high school to see where all the smoke was coming from.)

It was time to cover the old wood and put some rain gutters up (yep, our house has been naked all this time; it has never had rain gutters). We started with the soffit, fascia and a little siding up front. Some siding will be put in the back too, covering the wood siding on the extension.
With the siding going up, Julie decided it was time to take down the faded white shutters and replace them with new ones. This required sanding the old rusty rails on the porch and painting them black to match.
There were lots of beehives behind the shutters. I guess that comes with the territory.