Remodeling on the coldest day of the year

My horoscope for the beginning of 2017 says that the stars are aligned for successful home remodels, general home repairs and making my bedroom and oasis for better sleep.  Well, neither of my pigs are Libra's so I am not quite certain why they picked the coldest week of the season so far to remodel theirs.
  

It only took them two days and they managed to do enough damage that I might as well have put them in the middle of the ice-covered front lawn with a bed sheet and they would have been just as warm.  Saturday (almost the coldest day of the season so far), they decided to knock out the back wall removing four or five of the boards.  Not terrible since the back wall faces primarily west and is up against a hill, but still far enough away that they lost the wind break from that direction.  It was late, there was very little wind and they were buried deep in the hay so I knew they would be fine for the night.  

Sunday morning, with temperatures hovering around zero and a steadily increasing wind, I went out to find that they had taken boards out of and the tarp off the north wall.  Almost all of our weather comes from the north and west.  They had now removed about all of their protection from the elements.  If you have livestock, or want to have livestock, you will learn that it doesn't matter if the wind chill is 15 below and dropping; when your animals need attention, you take care of it.

At those temperatures the battery operated circular saw and drill wanted nothing to do with me.  The drill went inside to warm up.  I went out to the hut to take measurements albeit at the displeasure of the girls who had to move from their warm pile of hay so I could measure the back wall.  Back to the garage and the OSB (composite plywood) was cut to size.

Over the past couple of weeks we have had up and down temperatures with snow one day and rain the next.  Anyone who lives on a dirt road or has a dirt driveway in Northwestern Vermont has honed their ice walking skills this winter.  When you also take almost the same path each morning and evening over to feed and water the pigs, it gets pretty slick as well.  42 x 90 sheets of OSB make great sails against a steady wind - oh the you tube video might have gone viral if there had been a camera.

We climbed back inside the hut, unseating the girls, again!  The pieces slid in with only a little chopping of frozen hay and some nudging where it was too thick to be chopped away without bigger tools.  A bale of fresh hay to the girls and one to Zeb to top them off against the extra chill and it was over to the garage to clean up my mess.  

One thing that seems (knock on wood) to be working in my favor this year over last is that pre-planning, thinking it through, and triple checking that the materials and tools needed are on hand or procured before the first cut is made, has exponentially decreased the amount of time spent on farm projects.  Proper maintenance or checking that proper maintenance was completed before enlisting a particular tool to a task has also decreased the time that these projects are taking.

Perhaps, I am finally learning!