Barn Painting

When I first started at the City of Ann Arbor in 2009, one of the first things I noticed was the beautiful 100-plus-year-old barn. Unfortunately,the exterior had not been painted in the memory of anyone working at the course.

I set about trying to find someone who would be willing and able to undertake this task. I contacted historic barn preservation groups and farmers. I called painting companies and general contractors. I either got no response or an estimate that was well into five figures. I did find one barn restoration expert. He looked at the barn and had many things he wanted to do, in addition to painting the barn.  His cost estimate was not spectacularly high. All looked good for us to finally get the barn painted. When the city contacted him to get his tax information, he started complaining about the government regulations and refused to give any tax information for billing purposes. Another dead end.

Finally, the barn was in such a state that we could not ignore it anymore and the City Park Operations crew had to paint it. They rented a lift and bought 110 gallons of paint. The results were striking.

The barn in 2009

The barn today.

The first coat goes on the east side.

You can see the barn back in 2014.

From near #10 green in 2017.

This is a picture of one of the bat houses we mounted on the barn in 2012.

The south side (toward #17 tee) of the barn was worn the most.

I think this was taken in 2011.

The flag looks crooked due to the perspective of the camera. I hope.

July 2017 Weather Summary

At the end of last month's weather summary, I said that the month of June was boring. I promise to never say anything like that again.

July 2017 had an average temperature of 72.2 degrees, up about 3 degrees from June. The high temperature was 88.8 (July 19th) and the lowest recorded temperature was 50.3 (July 25th.)

What really gets interesting is when you start to look at the rain we got in July. We got 4.13 inches of rain, which is just above the 3.47 inches we have gotten in the last seven years. Unfortunately, 98% of that came within one seven day period, between July 7 and July 13. You might also remember that this is right before the City Championship at Leslie Park. Then the precipitation stopped. Technically, we got 0.06 inches of rain for the rest of the month, but that came over three different days. Eighteen days with appreciable rainfall. There were only 3 days where the high temperature was below 80 degrees during that time span, and one of those days was 79.2 degrees. The maximum amount of rain on one day was 2.07 inches. (July 7th.) There were seven total days of rain and two of those were over an inch. July 10th saw 1.01 inches fall.

Average windspeed was 1.1 mph. The highest recorded sustained windspeed was 33 mph, on the 12th, although these numbers are suspect, because we had an electrical surge at the barn during one of the storms. Along with frying the COM ports on the irrigation computer, it did something to the weather station. Now it only seems to record windspeed and humidity during daylight hours. I tried changing the battery, but that did not work, so must contact support at Davis instruments for some help with this issue.