Old Boxcars and Timbers

  Over the past few months, we've started adding onto our house a great big living room. I was planning on taking pictures throughout the entire project and then posting one post at the end of how it went together - But it seems that I have no where near enough patience to wait until then to share pictures! So, I'm going to post pictures of what we so far (in two or three different posts) and then continue to update until we're done! I have to say, this is soooo much more fun than waiting until the end!

So, I better start at the very beginning. That means going back to November of 2013. A friend kindly agreed to let us have the wooden beams under an old train boxcar if we would get them out and help clean up afterwards. Here's how it went down:

It started with me seeing this view for several miles. Person A drives the wheel loader, Person B (that would be me!) drives the truck. 

Here's what we saw when we got there. The trees around the cars had been cut and chopped, and now it was up to us to clean up the cars.

After a lot of cutting and breaking of chainsaw chains, we started to see some light at the end of the tunnel. AKA, we could see the beams.

The floor was cut out of the cars and then the cars were lifted up and taken to a burn area.

This was the sweet, dear little can of magic that got me through that day!

Here's where it gets down to the nitty gritty of the age of our beloved wood beams. This patent date says 12-11-17. So, we're figuring that if the car was built in 1917, the trees that the beams are from had to be cut down before that. And to make it all a little more confusing, we've counted over 80 rings in the beams! If there are over 80 rings in a beam alone, imagine how many were in the tree! We're thinking these babies are probably pretty ancient….

After we cut the floors out and removed the old cars, we stacked the two floors together and went back later with a trailer to haul them home.

Here you can see that the boards had been removed from the top floor (the bottom one still had its boards) and there were four beams under each floor. 

So that's the very beginning of this whole thing!
I'll continue to show the whole process as it happens,

Ashleigh