What Happens When an Old Barn Comes Down in Shasta County

Two barns that look identical from the county road can be nothing alike once the tin is off, one framed in sound heavy timber and the other held up by habit and fence wire. That difference decides how a teardown goes in Shasta County, CA, as the notes at shasta county house demolition renew grid mag describe. The structure is read first, post by post, before anyone decides whether it gets pulled down by machine or taken apart by hand.

Reading the frame

A crew probes the base of each post with a bar, looking for soft rot where wood met ground for sixty years. Posts that crumble mean the barn is standing on its roof and its neighbours, and nobody walks inside. Sound posts mean the frame can be unbolted and lowered in order, which saves the lumber.

Tin, then purlins, then rafters

Rusted tin roofing comes off first, sheet by sheet, with gloves and a cut bar, because edges on old corrugated steel slice through leather. Purlins and rafters follow. A reciprocating saw frees the pegged joints, and a mini excavator with a thumb lifts the heavy pieces down so nobody works under a swinging beam.

What the old lumber is worth

Hand-hewn timber and old growth planks from barns around Redding and Anderson are sought after for mantels and tables, and a crew that dismantles carefully can keep it out of the dumpster. Denailing is slow, and mills reject boards with buried nails, so sorting happens on the ground as the pieces come down.

Floors, footings and the stuff inside

Many old barns sit on stacked rock or a thin concrete slab with a perimeter footing. A breaker on a skid steer clears a slab. Inside there is usually years of hay, rodent nests, old oil and sometimes a buried tank, so the interior gets cleared and checked before any heavy machine enters.

Fire season and burn piles

Dry grass in a Shasta County summer makes burning old timber on site a bad idea even where a permit exists, and the Carr Fire left everyone near Whiskeytown Lake and along State Route 299 aware of how fast a pile gets away. Hauling the debris to a transfer yard is slower and a lot safer.

Closing out the site

Once the frame is down and loaded, the footprint is raked for nails and bolts and graded to drain. Nails left in dirt flatten tires for years, so a magnet sweep over the footprint is part of finishing the lot.