Restoring the Barn

(BB's Play-Shed)

We moved in to our present home in 1980 - a real fixer-upper - and with more enthusiasm than money set about restoring it. The previous owner, a single man in his seventies, had virtually camped out in it. There was no central heating (just praffin stoves and a gas fire) and the wiring was so old that all the sockets were still round-pin (something that was phased out in the 1960s in the UK except for specialist theatre lighting rigs). Our first experience was of plugging in to the mains sockets and each successive socket we tried blew. Ouch. So BB ran one new cable to a cooker point in the kitchen with one 13 amp socket on it and for the first couple of years we operated the whole house on that with a long extension lead. If you wanted to use the vacuum cleaner, you had to unplug the TV and vice versa. (Of course this was pre-home computers, so our electrical equipment consisted of cooker, vacuum, microwave and kettle, TV and stereo.)

I tell you about the house so you'll know that from 1980 we were fairly busy with the house and therefore the barn restoration was just a dream project. Whenever we had the money, we didn't have the time. Whenever we had the time, we didn't have the money. We're still kinda in the latter situation but since changing our travelling-for-work lifestyle BB has more time and plenty of inclination, so for the cost of a few bags of cement and a new pair of work-gloves he got started on the big project in the summer of 2006.

Basically for the first part of the project all the rotten timbers, damp floors and wobbly walls inside are being replaced. This is a huge undertaking for a solo (amateur) builder but BB is determined and very thorough, though, of course, not very fast. The only way we can afford to do this project at all is for him to do most of it himself - only bringing in professionals for the jobs he can't do (either physically or legally). At some point we need to consider the building's final use and at that point we have to make planning decisions which may affect the final stages of the job, but that's still years away. At the moment it's still a barn/workshop and none of tis round of renovations change that.

Eventually I'd like to turn the upper storey into a guest flat, but to do that we'd need change of use permission. (And I'm still arguing with BB about that possibility. He's not too keen on having his shed-domain invaded.

The final thing will have four areas: a clean room for all BBs computers and music equipment (with a good view of the garden); a main multi-use work area, open to the rafters, but fully enclosed and insulated; a small store room with an outside door - for general storage (and lawnmowers etc.) and an upstairs loafing area with a loo and a small kitchinette for tea/coffeemaking. (This is the area which could be turned into accommodation.)

The top splash of red is the house, the bottom is the barn. (Note the farmyard next door has changed since this plan was drawn)

This ariel shot was taken from a helicopter and is looking directly down from above in 1999. The construction has just started on the Park Head Farm housing development next door. The roof of the dairy is already complete but the lean-to farm building which nestles in the U-shape formed by our barn and the back of the dairy is stuill in place.

Unfortunately the builders who did the farmyard project were not hot on communication. We could have - and should have - taken advantage of the work to do something about the outside of the back wall of the barn which we'd never been able to access while it was in use as a farm building. I'm pretty sure we have some rights which were infringed - but the builder himself died just before the job was complete and we never did assert them. Our fault, I guess because we were away a lot at the time. But as a result the back of our building is now the boundary of someone's garden and is almost as inaccessible as it was before(without a lot of disruprion for the folks who live in the farmyard). We will need to get at it one day to point it... but not yet.

Our barn is hidden away round the back of the house, behind the building which used to be the village post office until 2001. These photos were taken in early 2005. The building on the left is a converted dairy - now a house.

The barn itself used to be a stable, cart store, hay and feed store, tack room, workshop and ostler's sleeping quarters, latterly garaging for 2 cars and a workshop and store. It is L-shaped (attached to the building on the left by its shortest wall) with the long arm of the L being the front and measuring approximately 40 feet long by 17 feet deep. The short arm of the L goes back from the right hand side for about 30 feet and is about 18 feet wide. When we started the project there were two stories but the wooden floor for the upper storey was very badly affected by woodworm. (We didn't realise how badly until we started taking bits of it down.)

Looking up the drive, these are our two garages. The left hand one is where the tack room used to be and the right hand one is the old stable. The workshop is out of sight to the right, masked by the old post office.

From the garden, you can see the back of the house (that big bit is the living room) with the barn on the right hand side. You can clearly see the valley gutter. the roof section to the right is the short arm of the L of the building.

How old is the barn? We just don't know. parts of the wall are an older style of masonry and it appears that it was built, extended altered over a period of possibly 150 years. It may even be thet the oldes part of it was a pig pen... and there was certainly an outside privy on the site because BB excavated old drainage leading to a corner where we know there used to be a cesspit in the pre-mains drains days.

BB's first job was to take up all the flaggstones (and some of them were blooming heavy) and then the whole floor had to be dig down to level the floor ready for laying concrete.

Because it was a stable floor there was a drainage slope so in order to get the required depth at the front of the building he had to excavate almost 2 feet down at the back, unearthing earlier foundations of a smaller building, possibly a privy, but who knows... it certainly wasn't close to where the drain came from.

We know when to leave a job to the experts. William Noble, a very fine local stonemason built us a new doorway. The only stipulation was that it had to look as though it had grown there... so all the stonework had to be inkeeping with the rest of the building.

scary hole

view There's a point at which it looks very scary, but William knew exactly what he was doing with pins and props. It got to this stage at the beginning of the summer 0f 06 and then William went off to France - eaving BB to finish digging out the floor and preparing the ground ready for the sill.

Once the hole was opened up we knew it was the right move. What a great view of the garden Brian will have from his 'shed' once it's finished.

Once William had started to build up the sides again it started to look less like a bomb site and more like a building. the stonework is perfect, but perfection takes time. You can't hurry that kind of craftsmanship. The lintel added the finishing touch.

And yet more digging of the floor. This is the old doorway that BB put in more than twenty years ago to block up the garage door in the workshop.

Above left: Note the wall on the right that divides the workshop from the garage. Excavations are just beginning You can just see the outline of the old doorway in the red brick above the gap. Above Right: The same gap from the other side. Note BB hasn't yet taken up the flaggstones in the garage side - this is the old stable with a floor of flaggstones and herringbone cobbles. At this stage in the plan we intended to leave that brick wall in situ... but it was not to be...

And then it was time to get the new concrete mixer into service. It took twelve and a half tons of concrete to lay a full concrete raft on the floor (all insulated, of course).

As each section went down it all began to look much more like a real building.

We seemed to be hopping over tranches and balancing on planks for months but eventually we had concrete floors - with just a few gaps for...stuff.

In the depths of winter when the temperatire was too cold for concrete laying BB decided to take three days to give the kitchen a quick lick of paint... one thing led to another and he spent a month restoring the kitchen floor. Work resumed on the barn in late February

The first floor woodwork was a bit dodgy - we already knew that - but when BB took out the stairs so he could level the floor he decided to take out some of the worst floor joists. The bad news was that there were no good ones. And once the joists had been demolished and the building opened to the rafters, the single skin brick wall looked decidedly inecure - wobbly, in fact.

Initially the plan had been to put a toilet downstairs - on the workshop side of the single skin wall - so BB took down half the wall for starters... but opening up the innards of the building gave him more ideas and the rest of the wall soon came down as well. The garden started to look like a building yard.

There was even more rubble added to the piles in the garden when BB dug across the yard for the drains. It was like an archaeological dig. BB found more pipes and drains than he knew what to do with. The main objective was to connect the toilet outflow pipe, but while the yard was in a mess it seemed sensible to get a plumber to come and connect a water supply. We found a lead pipe and feared the whole house supply was still running theough lead all the way up the drive but it turned out the lead pipe was redundant. Our water feeder pipe is steel... which also caused a problem or two, but eventually the water suply was installed in both the barn and the back shop. Once the plumbing was connected the trench could be closed.

The workshop area looked much better with its concrete floor. All together there was a total of twelve and a half tons of concrete - all mixed and laid single-handedly. For a few months BB left the back section of the upper floor in place - with just a ladder for access where the stair had been.

For the longest time, very little seemed to change on the outside... which is exactly the object of the exercise. When the barn restoration is finished it still has to look as though it grew there while being a useful work-space for Brian on the inside.

Here you can see a fairly crucial stage in the operation. The downstairs front window has been blocked up (because the new staircase will run across it) and most of the concrete is down (covered with blue plastic). The plumbing trench is still open and the half wall is still up.

And then BB changed his mind about putting the loo downstairs. It's now going to go upstairs. So the wobbly wall could come down in its entirity (which was a good thing as it was scarily wobbly once the floor joists were removed).

Once the last internal wall had come down the inside of the barn looked huge... well it is huge... but suddenly you got the full impact of the space.

Here's the first course of the new block wall to replace the wobbly wall. BB asked William to show him how to lay blocks and then got on with it - with William popping round now and then to keep a close eye on his new apprentice.

The first wall to go up is the main divider between the clean room and the big work-room. The huge window is there to let light and view in to the big room via the clean room. The iron girder (RSJ) will support a mezzanine accessed from the upper floor.

The wall at the back separates the clean room from the back store. It has an outside door which opens directly on to the garden - soon to be a new patio area. At the moment it's open to the rafters but there will be a new floor but in at just below the original height of the old floor.

This is going to be the entrance, but we haven't quite worked out what to do with it yet. The cheapest option is to put a wooden front into it not unlike the old wooden frontage which ised to be there, but if we can afford it we'd like to build a porch.

To insulate the big room (where the garages were) BB blocked up the two garage doors and then woo-panelled the block-work so from the outside they look exactly like two closed garage doors.

Sorry, I didn't take any pics of that in progress.

It may seem daft losing two garages but whan did we ever keep a car in our garage anyway. Might as well just admit it's an extra work-space and not a vehicle storage area. There's plenty of room in the yard to park cars.

And that's the first year's work for BB (in his 'spare time')

rough stuff In the summer of 07, being short of cash for the internal woodwork, which was ideally the next phase of the project, BB took all the flaggstones that had been in the barn and used them to lay two patios outside, also getting rid of some rubble - but unfortunately unearthing more as he dug out at the side of the barn. When the built the place they must have had a whole heap of stone left over, so the buried it... unfortunatrely exactly where BB wanted to put his new patio.

Digging it out wan't just spadework... it was pick and shovel work... and some of the rocks were massive.

All these rocks came from that little bit of dug ground... luckily there were enough to use for a couple of dry-stone retaining walls so waht started out as one patio turned into two. The second one gave us a patio outside the living room - which we'd planned to do years ago.

All the flaggstones that came out of the barn have gone back down on the two patios. It's nice to keep them in their real home.

For the patio outside the living room the slight slope outside the window meant that the dry stone wall had to be levelled very carefully. This was a job we'd promised ourselves we'd do for years... originally thinking we'd build a wooden deck, but...

The patio actually hides a load of rubble and stones that we needed to get rid of.

To all our American and Canadian Friends - this is how to build a Yorkshire deck! None of your sissy wooden stuff!

The crowning glory of BB's blockwork building hardly looks like anything on a photograph but it's a wall 25 ft long by 15 ft tall and it's lining the long back wall of the large room. That wall is particularly rough, and now it's got insulation and an extra thickness. It was finished at Christmas 2007.

And just this morning BB told me he'd ordered some timber to replace the old floor joists above the workshop... so restoration work continues into 2008 ...

Go to Barn Restoration 2008