But more to my point...
When my sister, Leslie, and I were much, much younger than we are now, we used to love to go to the farm. We would play in the creek, run through the barn, climb up the ladder to the loft... We even braved the 55 degree water to swim in the spring-fed pond one time, until we saw the size of the snapping turtles that were in there with us! (Now, mind you, we didn't know they were in there with us when we were actually IN the water. We saw them afterwards, when we had already gotten out because our lips were turning blue! Nonetheless, it scared the bejeezus out of us when we saw them later!!!)
There's a little-house-on-the-prairie type house that in its day was probably a decent size for as primitive as it must have been when first built. It did eventually have electricity, so it was most definitely used up until some point in the 20th century. When we first got the farm (about 1977), the buildings were in much better shape than they are now, unfortunately. We had several bouts of nasty weather over the last few years, and each successive storm has little by little taken its toll. The barn is starting to slip now, and the poor farm house has had quite a bit of it's tin roof taken off by the wind. The barn suffered some of that fate as well, and is now slowly falling in on the back side. A very sad state of disrepair, to say the least... Here, look...
The barn:
As you can see, these poor buildings have seen better days. We're now worried about the prospect of NOT doing something about this before it gets any worse, and so we are looking for ideas on how best to save them. We've been thinking of selling them to someone who would like to dismantle them and take them off to either be rebuilt into something that will be taken care of, or maybe even to build furniture, etc. from... Who knows? One thing is for certain, though... They both have fabulous character, don't you think?