I once had a well known writer ask me to build her “a little primitive shed where I can get away from the main house to collect my thoughts and do a little writing”.

And this is what I built.

And she loved it.

I’ve seen some amazing little outbuildings in all my travels. What do you think of this little red beauty?

The attached ladder to the outside, leading up to the attic, adds a lot to it’s charm.

I wonder… do you think the farmer brought in a architectural firm to design this?

And I further ponder what Country Living magazine would have done with the items out front… would they have removed them before taking a photo? or perhaps just rearranged what was there? 😉

The owners of this barn had us assemble a couple of picnic tables.

Most curious.

It was then that I fully realized that this barn would likely see more humans as visitors than farm animals.

And, I was ok with that. 🙂

And here she is fully restored… within a few years all the fresh new wood would turn grey and then to all the world driving by she would just be another old barn. But this barn, unlike so many others along that road, has been fully renewed and will be around for another hundred years.

Here we see that this little barn had reaching the tipping point in it’s restoration. We had removed all that was bad materials, and then, we gave her a good bath… with the aid of a power washer.

You can see the new lumber starting to go on, all of which was cut from a local sawmill using the same species of wood originally found in the barn.

How do you tell if a barn is worth saving?

Some would say that financially they are never worth saving… and they have a valid point. Old barns are money pits.

If you ever encounter a land owner who is working on their barn, give them a hug and a word of encouragement and appreciation for saving a treasured part of our landscape. Trust me, they will appreciate it.

For me, the guy doing the work, and not writing the check, the determining factor on saving a barn is… “Can I remove all the parts of the barn that are bad and find that the barn still stands?”

The answer to that question was “yes” for this barn and so that is where we started… removing the damaged and decayed wood.

There is a simple elegance to even the most basic of barns.

I’ve stared at them for years trying to figure out why my eye is drawn to them, while at the same time I am so repulsed by most of the new homes being built today.

Is it the simple basic lines? or perhaps, the lack of faux embellishments? or does it have nothing to do with the design, but rather with what these old structures represent?… a simpler time, a time when humans were more in tune with nature, with animals, and with other people.

Over the years I’ve been offered hundreds of old barns, free for the salvaging… each an opportunity for antique materials before these structures were bulldozed or burned down.

On some days there would be multiple unsolicited messages on my phone for me to come look at yet more of these unwanted relics of our past. For years the calls were overwhelming.

But the phone doesn’t ring with offers like that near as much any more… I fear what that means. For certain when I drive the roads of this state I don’t see those wonderful “cow houses” like I used to.

Most of those barns that I was offered… I never went to look at, there were just too many, my resources were too thin, and my focus was more on saving the old houses.

The houses that were in danger of being lost were from a much earlier period and contained much finer and more valuable materials. While most of the neglected barns were “20th century” and were built of materials identical to what one can obtain at any local sawmill.

Likely the vast majority of those barns that I was offered are gone. They are now just memories.

But this old barn still stands today… thanks to a little help from me and my crew… and the barn’s owner who surprised me when he took my advice to let me repair it.