Building the Castle

The Castle is stored 11 months out of the year in a barn on Jon's Grandpa's property. Years ago, Jon asked permission to build the barn and Grandpa said, "SURE!" and allowed Jon to build his barn.

Come October 1st, Jon is lining up time, borrowing trailers and off he goes to haul The Castle back to our house in town, trailer load by trailer load. Jon is a one-man, castle building machine.

The first day, the metal braces go up. This is some tricky maneuvering by Jon to erect these all by himself. I may have held one or two, but Jon does most of the building alone with the help of some trusty clamps and sheer smarts and muscles.

Second day, Jon starts screwing on the plywood. There are 120 sheets of plywood to be attached. Remember, Jon has loaded these all onto the trailer, unloaded them all off the trailer and now he has to manually lift and screw on each one. By this day, Jon was complaining of sore muscles and making noises that age is catching up to him.

This is The Castle this morning. Still lots of tweaking for Jon to do. We Ohioans have been blessed with lots of rain the past 2 weeks, so work halted on The Castle. We have increased foot and car traffic up and down our road and I'm sure they are itching to see things finished. There are two towers that still need plywood or something, but Jon needs help with that. My muscles are not up to the task.

If you look, you can see the Whiz, my orange kitty. He is sitting at the "doorway" to our house. Good times!

I'm off to help Jon. I'll be painting.