Building Old
When we first decided to put up a building, it was going to be a place for my mother to stay when she visited. A small place for a 70-something woman, except that she is not really a Tiny House kind of gal, and she definitely was not getting up in a loft. Plus we didn’t really “need” a just a house out back of our house, we needed a place where people could come for cooking classes and to host small events.
And so things evolved, for lack of a better term, reeling from one iteration of a barn-kitchen-house to another, the price tag climbing steadily each time something was added. There were too many regulations and related costs to make it a commercial kitchen where a person could develop food products—although such kitchens are sorely lacking in the county and the state. We scaled back, but still could not figure out an architecturally interesting idea that wouldn’t in the end be just another Morton building marring the Iowa landscape.
At some point, I got the (arguably stupid) idea to buy an old barn. There was one available from Iowa Barn Savers that was 24x36 feet, a just right, not-so-big space for my mom and perhaps an area for cooking classes downstairs. Plus, wouldn’t it save us money in the long run? The whole thing had already been a fully assembled barn since the 1880’s after all and only cost us $30,000—it was a steal!
The barn was taken down, each timber numbered, and shipped via a semi. It arrived, along with a man named Jason Fellmer from Colorado to help put it all back together. And thus began the artisanal building of the old into the new.
Putting up the frame was a feat, but it was only the very beginning. In order to have the timbers exposed in the interior of the building, we needed to - in effect -build a barn around the barn, putting up walls to enclose it. The roof boards that came with the frame became interior ceiling boards, with another roof framed above. And of course because it would be a dwelling used year round, there needed to be insulation, electrical, plumbing and heat, all things the original barn never had.
After the initial frame went up, Will James, a remarkably skilled local builder, took over as the project’s carpenter in the spring. With a little vision from us, a healthy dose of imaginative artistry from Will and a whole lot of “that ain’t gonna work” moments (including when the project was stopped dead because there was no room for the stairwell the architect had put into the drawings) we seem to have come out the other end. We are actually finishing up.
The Barn-House was built out of the original old wood, barn siding scavenged from friends, and wood we milled (we bought a mobile mill, too!). Yes, we did buy some from the lumber yard, and from a local mill too. But for the most part, wood from our own farm supports and adorns every part of the structure, from the new beams in the kitchen area to the beautiful Ash flooring on the second floor.
I wonder what the old barn thinks of all this remodeling and reusing. But I know what people like Will who have worked on it think: it has been one of the only times they have been asked to use their skills to make something durable and beautiful, not just quick and cheap. It’s something Iowa could use a little more of—high quality architecture—the kind that was built long ago when this barn first went up.
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Beautiful!!
I can’t wait to see it!