Milk House/Barn Update...Fingers Crossed

A few weeks ago I spoke of our plan for a milk house built of tires (shot down by Illinois EPA, for now) and our subsequent search for an old building we could move here. We found one we liked, standing out in her field...

but the gentleman who agreed to move it for us, gave us a $5000 price since it was so wide and over 9 miles from our farm. If we spent that much to move her there would be little left over for concrete, a small service door, some windows, etc...So, we sadly gave up on her. I have no idea why she is a she, she just is. We looked instead at a smaller building owned by a church.

The price was right, free, but the poor fellow had rotten feet and a rickety interior which likely, even though he was more compact at 25 x 25 feet, would not survive the move. After that we hit the Menards page and designed a building out of new materials. We played with door types, post thicknesses and colors but bottom line for their "economy" building at 25 x 40 feet was about $7000. And, we'd still have to pay delivery charges and put the building up ourselves.

Then one of you smart folks commented that maybe we could hire someone to take down the first building and move it. Keith thought of just such a guy we know, we bought all our salvaged wood from him for the Looney Bins beams and floors, and approached him. Sure enough he was willing to get a crew together to do that, dismantle the building and move it on a large trailer.

So back to the tenant farmer who farms around building number one, who turned us over to the farm manager. Said farm manager thought it was a good idea and took our offer of $1000 for the large 42 x 46 foot machine shed/barn. He still has to get approval from the elderly owner of the property, but he didn't think it would be a problem.

So it looks like maybe, possibly, probably we'll have a milk house/barn/machine shed. If we pay a total of $3500 to get it here to The Poor Farm, we'll still have enough money left to build a small room within the building complete with a concrete pad where we can keep our deep freezers and our milking equipment.

Thus instead of keeping all the milking equipment and buckets on a wheeled rack in our shower, it can be stored in the new (old) building. And instead of going into the icky shack house to get dinner out of our deep freezers, we can just grab something after we're done milking the cow. In addition the current cow shed, the steer shed, the livestock trailer shelter for my horse, the hay and straw in the feed shed, can all be relocated to the new barn. How flippin' convenient will that be?!?!

Now, I'm dreaming about layout planning for the new (old) building and paint colors, (that rust needs to be treated), and door sizes and loft storage and an area for a big band to play every Saturday night at our barn dances...