Labor of Barn Love

We are working on putting our farm in conservation easement.  The group that is doing all the really hard work pulled together some old photos (for a presentation to the Board for final approval).  I had forgotten what a labor of love our farm had been although part of me wanted to forget all about it (a story for another day - let's just say this will be the last renovation I'll ever do).  But our barn was about to collapse and we wanted badly an old house and an old barn.  So we tackled it.  Most people assumed we would tear it down.

Here's what it used to look like:

 I don't know when this picture was taken - it has some age to it as the barn looked much worse than this we bought it.  The annex that is on the west side totally collapsed and left a hole in the side.  You could see through three sides of the barn and we used 7500 linear feet of poplar to replace the wood.  Most of the wood on the barn was replaced.  A new galvanized steel roof was added with gutters.  There was a spring inside the barn below where my horses now live.  This fence line was not here when we purchased the property and there was junk everywhere. Sometimes I wonder what were we thinking?

This is what it looks like today:

Now we have a fully functional barn with six stalls, feed room, tack room, wash stall, concrete aisle, baseboard heat and there is room upstairs for a basketball court, literally.  The upstairs is three stories high. I have no idea what we'll do when we need to change a light bulb.  We had a car and boat upstairs at one time.  

If we had not renovated this when we did, we would not be able to do it now, sadly.  The price of the roof has more than doubled, wood has gone up exponentially so it would probably be out of reach to do the type of restoration that we did, so we are lucky.  The barns in the Shenandoah Valley were burned during the War of Northern Aggression (The Civil War) so the only ones that were left standing were brick.  Ours dates to the late 1800's.  I hope it will live another 150 years!

This is my view most mornings.  This photo was taken this summer. This morning was spectacular.  So in the end I think it was worth it!