RIVER CITY JOURNAL: INSERT TAB A INTO SLOT G (NEXT TO HUB 3 -- LEFT SIDE ONLY)

Honest to goodness, I'm not making this up. And the print is smudged, so that could be Slot C or Slot 8 or ...

I'd like to be able to tell you that my barn-building project is out of my system. But it's not.

There are two boxes of prefabricated metal pieces on the floor of my garage. If I procrastinate long enough, my garage will not only provide shelter for all the things I'd like to put into my new storage shed, but it will also become home to my unassembled barn.

"Takes only two hours to assemble," it says in big type in three languages on the outside of both boxes of pieces-parts. Yeah. Right. I'm still looking for the itsy-bitsy words, somewhere on those boxes, that inform me the two-hour assembly time is for a six-man team of factory trained installers who not only know one end of a screwdriver from another, but who also can read what it says in those other two languages.

This week has been devoted to site preparation. That sounds pretty official, doesn't it? I think I would be much further along except for the fact that some of my neighbors have offered their assistance. Not with digging post holes or nailing up decorative fence pickets, mind you. My neighbors are what you might call good-intentioned advice givers.

This reminds me of a sign posted at the service station we frequented when we lived in Maryville, Mo. It said:

Repair rates

$10 an hour

$15 if you watch

$25 if you help

Now that I'm full of advice, I really should get on with putting this barn together.

I'd like to be able to tell you that my wife completely understands why putting up a shed on our limited tract of real estate is so important. Oh, sure, she understands the male psyche and the need for white-haired boys to play outdoors. Goodness knows she understands that after nearly 34 years of marriage, raising two sons and growing up with two brothers.

One thing she doesn't understand, however, is why I keep calling this structure a barn. "That makes it sound so ... something," she told me.

When I was growing up on the Kelo Valley farm in the Ozarks west of here, we had a barn. And we had a whole collection of sheds.

The barn was a classic barnyard structure complete with hayloft, manger and milking stalls. The main support timbers were oak logs, no doubt cut on that very farm, that were at least 20 inches in diameter and more than 30 feet long. They were magnificent and solid, having been sheltered all those years by a tin roof. Near the top of one of the timbers, someone had carved "1880" into the hard wood. We always assumed that was either the date the barn was built or the date the carver decided to try out his new jackknife. One or the other.

Nearer to the farmhouse were other, smaller buildings. These were usually called sheds. There was the chicken shed. And the wood shed. and the tool shed, which actually at one time might have been all or part of the original farmhouse. Farthest away from the house was the shed where one sought privacy. This shed was usually called a two-holer. If you ever lived with one, you need no explanation. If you've always enjoyed indoor plumbing, you wouldn't understand.

In my mind, then, a barn is a structure of high purpose and soaring dimensions. Sheds, on the other hand, are less significant and, in the pecking order of buildings, closer to the bottom than the top.

That's why I call the building envisioned for our yard a barn and not a shed.

I'd like to be able to tell you that the spacious, towering barn of my youth and the prefab cartons on my garage floor are somehow related. Except for the fact that I call both of them barns, they're not even kissing cousins.

The more I look at the neat stacks of precut metal in those boxes, the more I wonder if every occupant I want my barn to house will have a home when it's all said and done.

One thing I can say for sure: My admiration for folks who possess skills in carpentry and things mechanical has just gone up another notch. Several notches, in fact.

Thank goodness the instructions for assembling my barn are in just one language, not three, even though I'm not sure I completely understand instructional English. Not once, however, do I see the words "Not that way, stupid! Use the other end!"

How good, really, are instructions that don't yell at you?

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.