This old garage….

Storage at the farm is tough to find right now. Building materials and tools take up a lot of room. Step by step we have cleaned up storage space around the farm, starting with the cellar and garage. While those spaces have served their use, we have a little more than can comfortably fit in those spaces. We wanted to find a solution that helped clean up an area of the farm and gave us another area to expand our garden. This lead us to the old garage.

The brush has grown up over the years, but the lower portion of the garage was timber-framed and seems to be in good enough shape for the time being. The other side was a different story.

The high side of the structure was in complete disrepair. To be blunt, a strong wind should have taken it down years ago. The only things holding the two remaining walls up were the header and the fact that it was timber-framed with old growth wood.

The only solution for this side was to replace the garage with a new structure. We were able to save some good pieces of weathered wood. This garage has been here for close to 100 years so we’d love to find a way to re-purpose and recycle as much as we can.

The whole project started with clearing the brush and cleaning the lower shed out.

Once the lower side was cleaned out and we had room to store our materials for the build, we started clearing the high side.

There was quite a bit of metal, most likely from the roof, underneath all the leaves and brush. Slowly we removed the debris and cleared a spot to erect our garden barn.

Once the posts were set we were able to frame the sides and the barn started taking shape. Once the barn was framed we went searching the fallen buildings for salvageable materials. As luck would have it we found metal roofing from a fallen building. While this isn’t normally the process of finding a roof, we are trying to reuse as many materials as we can.

It started raining after we put the roof on, but that was just a better reason to start siding the barn. We used cedar fence slats for the siding. We have used it everywhere else and it worked out beautifully as siding. Once the siding was up we started on the front.

Last year we cleared a lot of brush from around this area and stacked it for chipping into mulch for the gardens. We just happened to not look into the future and see that where we stacked it was going to be right in our way. This took a little bit of work, but we moved the brush piles and cleared the overgrown grass. This left the perfect spot for working on the front side of the barn. We started putting siding up on the front, but with any project, time ran out and we had to stop.