A farm can become an expensive endeavor if you let it. I have 4 teen-age children who I expect will want to go to college one day or another, so if I want to do something on the farm, I tend to do it by myself, or with their help, and I try to do it inexpensively. One has to realize that most of our ancestors were farmers at one time or another, and if we go back far enough they did a lot more than you or I could imagine with some muscle, a lot of brain power, and no modern equipment. You can do things on your small farm or in your large yard just like they did if you give it a try.

Planning is good, but sometimes you have to just do it. My son Michael and I built a shed this summer with no plans. We just found a rough-cut saw mill where the wood costs a lot less than wood from the big home improvement stores, and we started building, just kind of dreaming it up and changing it a bit as we went along. I have to admit we did buy treated 4x4s from Lowes for our poles, because we couldn't find any Locust 4x4s, but probably about 90% of the shed is built from the sawmill and our local hardware store. We bought the metal for the roof from a Mennonite friend/roofer who let us buy some of his extras from the stacks he has behind his shop.at a reasonable/friendly price.

The shed was originally going to be an 8x8 shed, but we kept moving the 4X4s, and eventually the shed grew to a 12x16 building with 8 foot tall side walls, and one side with a 10 foot tall side wall to give us our slope for the roof. We just built the doors the other day, but didn't hang them yet, because the wood is a bit green, and we want it to dry out some because the doors are pretty heavy. They will lighten up a bit shortly. We also intend to build a 4x16 loft under the high side of the roof. We'll probably do it this winter. And we need to put the battens on the siding once the wood dries out some more, and before the snow starts flying up here, and boy does it snow on our mountain.

I am just going to put some of the pictures of our project so far for your perusal. I imagine I will put the pictures here a bit at a time, because this is taking me too long.

We just used our hand powered post hole digger and sunk the 4x4, and started to build on them. This was a lot of work

The construction site became a family hang out and climbing wall.

We used 1x8x8 boards and 5 pounds of nails to put up the siding. And we pounded it in with our made in the USA Vaughn  hammers recently bought for a reasonable price at Sears. (picture of them later, What a great hammer.)

More photos to come. .