"Hanging the Livestock, Burning..."

Barns. The farm has three barn barns.
And many many other outbuildings like quonset huts and corn cribs and garages and sea shipping containers and hangers and milking parlors and spring houses and pole barns and chicken coops.
Dingo's doghouse was the springhouse. Darwin's doghouse is this ratty looking corncrib.The barn barns are old. Old old.
I'm not real good with the emphasis part of writing.
The barn at the Merrin place marks the date it was erected. And the start of the Civil War. No slaves were used to build her. The other two I don't know the exact date for. The only one with the required barn-red red is the newest one. All three houses are also as old as their respective barns, but because we live in them they are repaired and rebuilt and added onto much more extensively, effectively hiding the original appearance. The barns however were built with lumber cleared from the land here, rough-hewed with hand axes to create the poles, and fitted together with wooden pegs instead of nails.
It's amazing what some people can do. Especially those dead ones.
An untreated wooden structure exposed to year-round sun, innumerable violent storms, freezing and thawing a thousand times, will fall apart. The surrounding county is littered with half-collapsed and dead pool worthy barn carcasses. Tempting to us hicks with 4wd trucks and log chains at our bored disposal.
My main hay barn has issues. Less the regular rot and collapse issues and more the "not designed with tractors in mind" type issues. When I first got home my tractor stuck a hole in the floor. When we stopped pulling up rotting floor, we were left with a hole 8'x12'. That was patched. Now my roof on the main addition is falling in. Mostly from being very gently tapped by a cotton-candy tractor lugging a hovercraft of a haybale.
So this week my cousin's cousin Becky and my uncle and I shall try to return one more barn to usability. Sometimes it's nice to have a life that is measured almost exclusively very measurable things. I have 36 calves. I have 75 bales of hay. I do not have an 8x12 foot hole.