Hi, thank you, and intro to Barn to Home addition project

JimXJ2000 · January 14, 2015, 03:13:22 PM

I want to say Hi and to thank you for having this forum.

I have been working on a re-used old barn to house addition for living space project. This forum has provided many good ideas.

I tried to join last spring...and I did. I just didn't know it until recently; with the addition project, a full time job and 5 children at home "free time" has be come a myth. So now I will post a thank you and share the project. And soon have some more questions.

Our project was to add more living space to a circa 1740's cape style house in NH...5 kids and the Cape sort of has only 2 bedrooms. You can see the issue. Early on we wanted to keep with the timber frame of the old house and 1970's "L" on the back. We looked at new timber frame which was out of our budget and found our way to re-using an old barn. Which could be less expensive, as long as our work time doesn't count and we really like the old wood.

Last summer we found the barn...roughly a 1760's English style that had been abandoned from sometime. It was about 36X80. The family that owned it was looking to have it taken down since they had all moved away. They knew the barn guy we had been working with and that worked out.

If my posting the picture worked, you can tell it was in great shape! The front is deceiving; there was a lot of beautiful timber, sheathing and floor planks in the barn.

This spring the barn was taken down, moved. We had a new foundation poured, built a stick frame (more or less) first floor deck. We (wife and kids) removed buckets of old nails, cleaned hundreds of board feet of sheathing and timbers over the summer. Worked with the barn guy (which was great) to do some limited modifications (extending post bottoms, moving girt heights) to the frame.

It went back up in August as a 30X36 barn attached to the house. We have been working on it since then.

Insulation is a modified wrap and strap system that borrowed some ideas from the REMOTE system. All information that saved $$$ over SIPS and allowed us the flexibility we needed when adapting an old frame.

We had a race with winter that ended in a draw to get it weather tight. That is mostly done and we are moving on to the inside work (floors, walls, wiring, etc).

It has been a great project. I'll post more pictures and questions soon.

Thanks again.