I started a job on the May bank holiday that I had looked at doing 10 years ago but decided against. I started to paint a farm shed. This particular shed was built as a grant job in 1972.

It’s still a reasonable size of a shed, but in its day, compared with the small byres that everyone was used to, I’d say this shed would have been thought of as state of the art. It’s four bays long by about 50 feet wide and has an apex roof. There is an internal wall splitting the shed, not quite in half. The larger side is just an open shed, do with it what you may. Before I built my last two slatted sheds, I used to use it as pens for calving.

It was quite a change from the traditional hay that everyone was used to and comparable today I suppose to putting in the Lely robot.

Now it mainly gets used for storing meal and machinery. The smaller side is a cubicle shed, with 32 cubicles. The cubicle shed opens out onto open yard and silage pit, this would have been at the start of silage making in Ireland. It was quite a change from the traditional hay that everyone was used to and comparable today I suppose to putting in the Lely robot. Originally it was a self-feed system with an electric fence across the face of the pit. The cows were allowed to wander around the entire yard, the yard and cubicle shed were adjoined by an open slurry lagoon or slurry pit as we always called it and the slurry from both yard and shed was scraped down into this pit using a tractor scraper. The self-feed system was done away with, sometime probably in the late 70s or early 80s, a feed barrier was put in outside the cubicle shed door and an easy feed system was adopted.

The Fordson Dexta had a front loader and grab on it and that is what was used to feed the silage. That is what was still being used when I became old enough to drive. There was a fair knack in managing to get a grab full of double chop silage ripped out of the pit, especially with a Dexta. It wasn’t just a matter of closing the grab and lifting it out like it is with today’s shear grabs, there were all kinds of manoeuvres that has to be under taken and you needed fair arms on you to steer the machine when you finally did manage to get the grab ripped out. But enough reminiscing and back to my painting.

Patch

As I said, I had looked at doing this job 10 years ago when I was up on the roof patching holes, but decided against it as I thought it wasn’t worth spending the money on. “I’ll patch these holes, take as long as I can out of it and then put on a new roof,” I thought to myself. But the unsightly rust was beginning to bug me. There were another few holes that need patching so up I went to take a look. Apart from the few holes that are always there where two sheets of tin meet and the moisture gets trapped between them, in general the roof was in no worse condition than it was 10 years previous.

So, I decided to bite the bullet and paint it. Three 20l drums of oxide paint and five corrugated rollers later, I’m slightly over half way through. Everything that I can see from the house is painted so I’m happy enough. The rest will get finished eventually this summer, I hope. It’s probably unlikely I’ll get another 48 years out of it but hopefully I’ve prolonged it’s life a little and it’s definitely easier to look at.

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