Building a Barn Leanto - Part 3

Looking a little like something out of Kubrick's "2001 : A Space Odyssey" - no, it's not our "on farm" monolith.  It's the very first post out of the 4 needed to get this leanto completed.  A very heavy, 16' long 6x6 pressure treated post.

The hole is almost 5 feet deep - the little backhoe did a great job of digging for me.  Once I got to the depth I wanted a full 80# bag of concrete was dumped in unmixed.  The natural moisture in the ground will slowly cure the mixture into a very solid footer that should keep the post from sinking at all with the weight of to-be-built roof.  The post then sits on the footer, the top of the post at about 48" below grade.

Adding the soil back in about 4" at a time and then splashing a little water into the hole and tamping the ground solid resulted in a very time consuming process (one hole by myself took a over 2 hours) that resulted in a VERY solid and tightly packed soil ball around the post...  Which is exactly what I want.

The plan is to knock out one post a night over the next 3 nights - let things sit Friday (as I will then have to tend to a bunch of other things going on around the farm that are being neglected due to construction (like weeding the asparagus, hilling the onions, mulching with straw, weeding the peas, weeding everything else, turning the gardens over with the plow or disk and re-potting the tomatoes into 1 gallon pots).

Yeah - there's a lot to do...

Comments

[Jeph Remley]

You're VERY patient with this stuff.

So do you have Kelli hold the post straight up for the full 2 hours, while you're backfilling?

[Andy]

Hah - no - I nailed 2 small board "kickstands" on the post and adjusted it a little every time I pitched in soil. I did have her help with the spacer so it will line up with the existing barn. More importantly, she made dinner and then brought me a huge glass of water!