Barn Facelift

Our barn is functional. Our barn provides shelter from the elements. Our barn is big enough to house our animals. But, our barn is kinda ugly. I did a post awhile back about my love for old barns. I continue to dream about the day when we'll be able to build a beautiful, gothic arch barn but in the meantime, we have to address the eyesore of the current barn we have.

It's amazing the amount of energy that is lost whenever you look at your window and see something that is less than pleasing to the eye. It gnaws at you, screaming that something must be done. We decided to take some action and give the front of our barn a facelift.

I'll apologize now for the lack of pictures. When we get started on a projected, I get completely focused on what I'm doing rather than thinking about taking pictures. We'll have to make do with what we have! We began by removing the extremely heavy, huge sliding barn door. Our plan was to reuse the hardware but make the door into two separate sliding doors. It would be much more functional this way.

Next, we tore off the old metal siding that had seen better days. This was some hot work and could only be done in the cool, morning hours.

We then changed the the framing of the barn door to be slightly shorter and we also framed in a doorway for a simple open and close type door for when we don't want to use the sliders (during the winter mostly).

We bought new, white siding that instantly improved the look of the whole structure. What a difference! We were going for functionality but also aesthetics so I decided to spray paint all the metal hardware with a hammered metal look spray paint. This made everything look like new!

We found an exterior entry door at our local Re-Store for just $65. Yes please!

Last, but not least, we built our new barn doors. We cut some 1/2" plywood to the finished size we wanted and then cut and placed 1" thick old, weathered planks on top of the plywood. We salvaged these wood planks from our neighbor's old horse shed that he was tearing down. We attached the hardware and hung the doors. This is much easier said than done seeing how each door weighed at least 150 pounds!

What a transformation! There are still some final touches like installing some weather stripping around the doors. A cupola for the roof and a custom farm sign will finish things off nicely, but that will come in good time. For now, I can look out my window and smile at the sight I see.