This summer, my husband began building his long-dreamed of barn-shaped workshop. From the beginning he ignored everything else: The yard work, his children’s housing projects, physical injuries and family crises. Supper table conversations centered on one topic – the barn.
With a detailed, blueprint off e-Bay, he prowled local lumber yards pricing building materials until he filled the back corner of the yard with piles of lumber, shingles, nails and insulation. A friend came over to help – and to repay the work hubby had done for him last year. They started to raise the first wall – and dropped it heavily on my husband’s thumb. Nothing broke except the skin – and his building schedule.
He showed up at the family reunion camp-out with a very, swollen left thumb.
Back home again, not even a thumb guard kept him from hitting his sore thumb with the hammer as they built trusses for the steep roof over the second floor storage. His building buddies – men who formerly worked in education, science, engineering and administration – came for days to help raise the barn roof. Combining their mental expertise, they developed a system to lift the heavy trusses using nearby pine trees and a system of ropes and pulleys.
The more time they spent in our back yard, the more each felt involved. A neighbor carried shingles and mowed our overgrown yard, “because you have been working hard on that barn.” A couple men brought their wives out to see the two-story barn they had helped raise.
Requests from our sons for help on their houses received the same answer, “after I get the barn covered and the windows and doors in place.”
Installing three windows – no problem. Shingling a steep barn roof – scary, tedious and very hard.
A persistent, concerned friend showed up and moved the shingling timeline ahead at triple speed. I left for work relieved someone would be around to pick him up if he slipped off the steep roof.
With only the doors left, my carpenter told the guys he did not need their help. And he didn’t. Not for the double door on the side. Not for the regular door on the front and – I assumed – not for the genuine, drop down barn door into the hay loft.
During my daily inspection, I said, “so, now that the main floor doors are done, I guess you will be putting in the stairs before you do the hayloft door?”
Putting in the stairs would take too much time, he explained. He wanted to get the building in the dry.
I shrugged, “Well, I thin
k you need the stairs, but it’s your project.”
He built the door and proudly showed me how it would fit. I stepped around the ladder leaning against the bottom of his hayloft door and told him, “Looks good. I’ll be late tonight.”
The rest of the story I only know because he told me.
Using the ladder he pulled and slid the finished door up to the attic doorway and hooked it to the trolley. Because the door opened down, he really needed another person to attach the hinges, but after much effort, he screwed them in place by himself.
“Finally,” he said, “I pulled the door closed and it fit perfectly. I felt pretty proud – until I realized – I couldn’t get out of the attic. I had built myself into it. If I opened the door, it went down and covered the ladder. If I pulled the door up, I couldn’t reach the ladder. That door was the only exit. I didn’t even have a saw with me – just a drill and I did not want to drill a big enough hole to get down to the shop.”
And for sure – after all the work it took to put in the hinges, he had no intentions of simply removing them.
He decided to wait until I came home and could move the ladder for him.
After gathering up the clutter from building, he sat down and waited – an hour, two hours, until he remembered I had said I would be late.
Determined to get out, he lowered the door until it was sticking straight out from the building – held in place with only hinges and the anchored, pulley ropes.
“I laid down and eased myself out onto the door until I could reach under it and touch the ladder with the tip of my fingers,” he told me.
He inched the aluminum ladder away from under the door, let the door down and finally escaped his self-imprisonment.
When I finally came home, my husband told me about his long wait for me in the dark attic of his workshop barn.
I only had one thing to say, “I told you to put that stairway in first.”