willowbrook farm

historic yellow springs

Beginning of The Big Barn Renovation

Hello again! Sorry to have been away for so long…We started to gut the Upper Barn… and I got lost! I have attached some pictures so that you can see how that might have happened. We have this awesome old Bank Barn that was built in the late 1700’s but burnt down in the 1860’s. We found an old newspaper clipping stating that it burnt down after catching fire from a tramp’s cigarette and was rebuilt soon after. It has the fabulous markings of a barn that was heavily used, year after year, to store the equipment of the working dairy farm as well as the hay and other grains that would have been harvested on the 150 acre farm. Fortunately, for us, it had became a cavernous storage area over the years.  Discarded windows, doors, woodwork, shutters, sinks etc, that document years of architectural changes are piled against the massive stone walls.

 Unfortunately, joining those historical elements were objects that ended up there due to our inability to separate from them “just in case we needed them one day.”

 Well I finally took the bull by the horns and spent a significant amount of time purging the items in the barn. We all know how much stuff we can accumulate when you have a large area where you can put it and it does not interfere with your everyday life! Decisions, decisions…what to keep? what can be made into new objects? what becomes a past memory?  Did I forget to tell you that this massive project was totally predicated by a dumpster showing up outside of the barn, along with a few Amish barn builders and stone masons? They simply asked the question, “What are we supposed to do with all this stuff?” Enough said!

Stay tuned for the progress… 

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