Yes, We Live in a Barn

They turned a weathered old relic into her first real home.

Story & photos by Deb Riley, Canal Fulton, Ohio

Remember when your mom used to tell you to close the door or to pick up after yourself?

“Do you think you live in a barn?” she'd ask.

Well, I do now. My husband and I live in a 100-year-old barn that we turned into a house (right). When I look at the home we’ve made for ourselves in the Ohio countryside, I can hardly believe what it was like when we started. Many people told us we had lost our minds, and there were times we agreed. But our home is just what we envisioned—a lifelong dream come true.

A place to call home

Bill and I traveled the world for the first 20 years of our marriage. Shortly after marrying in Kansas, we accepted civilian positions with the U.S. Army and were sent to Frankfurt, Germany. Bill worked for the Corps of Engineers, while I worked for the hospital. We moved three times in Europe and then a few more times when we came back to the U.S.

Before that, I was an Air Force brat, moving every couple of years as my dad transferred from one base to the next. So you see, I never had a home. I had lived in lots of houses, but never a home.

All that changed when we moved to Ohio and decided to put down roots. The beautiful farms in our area fascinated us, and we thought about buying a small piece of land and building a log cabin. After going to a couple of homestead auctions, we started looking at barns, thinking they would make remarkable houses.

Bill has a construction background, so he was able to formulate a plan. We spent several years going to auctions all over Ohio, searching for the right barn at the right price.

Then Sept. 11 happened. Our younger daughter, Adrey, was living in Pennsylvania at the time. That night we talked on the phone, cried together and started looking at what was really important. Adrey said she wanted to move back to Ohio, the only home she’d ever known.

The perfect spot

Adrey came for a visit that Thanksgiving and found a job that weekend. By Christmas, she was living in our basement apartment. We felt truly blessed to have her home again.

Adrey married Aaron, the man of her dreams, the following November. In January 2003, we partnered with them to buy 5.5 acres at an auction. The plan was for them to take the farmhouse while we restored and converted the barn.

We began work in June. The barn was full of hay, and the family who’d owned the place before had nine boys who used it as a garage to work on cars. The grain bins were piled high with old car parts, hundreds of tires, clutches, dirty coveralls and grease buckets. The bottom of the barn had been a dairy operation and was caked with ancient manure and mud.

Wasps and yellow jackets had taken up residence in the hayloft. One day, I decided I could get rid of them, so I suited up in my coveralls, boots, hat and motorcycle helmet. Bill taped all the seams, and I went after a 4-foot-long nest with a pitchfork. Within seconds, thousands of yellow jackets swarmed all over me. It scared me to death, and as I went running to Bill, he soaked me with the hose to get them off.

Several stings wiser, I asked our handyman to shove the nest off into the grass and set it on fire.

In the years that followed, we came home from our day jobs—I’m a nurse and Bill works for a housing authority—and went straight to the barn. We did most of the work ourselves, occasionally hiring a subcontractor or two who shared our vision.

We had the siding down and the shell completed in the fall of 2003. That winter was the coldest I can remember. Our electricians and plumbers dressed in layers and layers to keep warm.

As summer approached, we were ready for siding and the inside framing. We had to work around the existing beams: No wall was square, so the drywall was cut to fit between the beams. Bill and I left a few beams exposed and spent days cleaning them because they were embedded with years of dirt and dust.

When we finally moved into the bedroom in 2004 and turned the heat on, we heard loud cracks that sounded like a tree falling into the house. It turns out the beams were just getting acclimated to the heat and were expanding.

Truth be told, the barn is still a work in progress. I thought it would be done by Christmas 2004. I guess I had been watching a little too much TLC.

Our piece of country

In the end, we turned our 3,500-square-foot barn into a cozy home with one bedroom, a great room, a loft, 2½ baths, a two-car garage, a shop and a craft room. We added another bedroom when our grandson Alex moved in. Then the two-car garage became a two-stall horse barn. After our granddaughters came along, the spring house found a new purpose as the playhouse.

We share our piece of country with our daughter and her family, two horses, two barn cats and three dogs. We have flower and vegetable gardens with raised beds made out of the oak beams we took from the barn, an apple orchard and the most incredible peace and quiet in the world.

Bill and I made a haven where our family comes together, with land for the kids to explore—our little piece of heaven on earth. We can’t think of a better place to call home.