An update from Maine and talk of barns
I call him a “neighbor on the digital gravel road”.
Lou Ureneck's cabin in Maine
Lou Ureneck blogged about his cabin building on the New York Times and has moved his blog to it’s new home at MaineCabinBlog.com coinciding with his completion and move in to the space. We’ve swapped emails from time to time during his building and I look forward to his notes, ideas, challenges, and sharing the world of a small cabin life. So, as I wrote earlier, what do you call a colleague / friend / email correspondent / blog buddy? “Neighbor” works well.
This week, Lou posted a few tiny cabin designs from a book he is reading and that led us to a discussion of “what’s next?” and for both of us, it’s a barn. Before I go on and talk about barn plans for Two Mile, I encourage you to visit both Lou’s NY Times blog and his new blog.
Two Mile Barn
I picked out this barn design before I began building the cabin.
My hope is to have both a nice work and storage space as well as a potential guest space in a carriage house loft. I like the plans and their modular design, in practice, I could build the center module, and then add the lean-tos on either side and end as I need to expand.
Walnut Woods design by DJ Berg
A design like this won’t house large farm implements, but will over protection for the boat, the truck, and make a nice heated and predator-proof space for brooding chicks and a sick bay isolation area. I had an estimate for nearly $20k to build this as a shell, interior work, electric and plumbing would be on top of that estimate. I suppose it’s time to get a bid on the materials and see if I can carve out part of a summer and fall to build it.
When I first came to Two Mile, I thought the barn had potential to be rebuilt and restored. In the late 1930′s and 1940′s, when barn builders put thousands of these bards on farms, they didn’t do much foundation work or consider the frost heave. This barn lists about 2 feet to the north. It’s quaint and has some storage ability. There are days I think about fixing it up to make some shed like storage that would be 75 percent weather resistant.
The existing barn (2005 photo)
So maybe this spring, I’ll take another stab at the old barn, clearing out years of now-composted straw and manure and see if I can take advantage of what is there.
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