My Barn Project
by Cindy A. Reid

For the last several years I had been trying to buy a house for my seventeen-year-old daughter and myself. These were the basic parameters:

1. Must be located in northern Dutchess County
2. Must be affordable
3. Must be structurally sound
4. Must feel right from the minute I laid eyes on it.

There were two times when I came very close, but in the end they were both a no-go. (See # 3 and # 4 above)

During my laborious search period the housing market became tighter with fewer houses in my neighborhood to pick from, and the prices got higher with even fewer houses in my price range. A word about price range. My parents purchased their first home in Dutchess County in 1960 for $12,000, and their last home in Dutchess County for $55,000 in 1976. (Both were new homes.) My price range as a single parent topped out at $100,000, which effectively put home ownership in northern Dutchess County out of my reach. Facing reality I started to look in Ulster County and found the same dismal scenario of tight market and high prices.

One night after listening to me carry on about the housing situation for what must have been the millionth time, my mother said, "Why don't you live in the barn?" Now the barn idea had been bandied about over the years but no one ever took it seriously. For one thing, it seemed foolish, because it would involve my whole family, since the barn is located on a corner of my mother's property in southern Columbia County. For another, this particular barn is a 150-year post and beam barn that has been added onto and somewhat remodeled over the years, but in no way can be confused with an actual house in that it lacks plumbing, septic system, heat, etc.

Nonetheless, without thinking, I said: "Yes, actually, I would like to live in the barn." My answer surprised us both. She urged me to think about it but I said no thinking needed, let's do it. (See #4 above).

After this conversation, relief and reality. Relief because the solution was at hand: to remodel the barn located on my mother's property. Reality as the enormity of the challenge ahead sunk in. In due course my solution came to be known as the "Barn Project" (as in "I am too busy to do anything else because I am working on the 'Barn Project'!)

The first hurdle was to figure out how to obtain the proper permits and what kind of local zoning requirements needed to be met. After a call to the local zoning official it all became as clear as mud.

Planning Board

We needed to concoct something called a "site plan" and submit three copies of it, three survey maps, and a site plan application to the planning board. We also needed to send a registered certified letter to each adjoining property owner stating the building intention and the date and time we would be appearing before the planning board. Complicating matters was the timing, in that the site plan/application paperwork had to filed with the town clerk by 5pm the Thursday previous to the PB meeting which would be on the following first Wednesday of the month. The registered certified letters had a different schedule; they had to be received by the property owners ten days before the PB meeting.

We were in luck because there was room for us on the next PB meeting agenda--which meant we needed to accomplish all the paperwork within the next few weeks.

Having recently assisted my daughter with college applications and the more daunting financial aid forms, I was not worried about the paperwork necessary for the site plan application. My philosophy is: if you break down the whole process into a series of manageable steps, accomplishing one at a time, inevitably you arrive at a successful conclusion. Foolproof.

How ludicrous that all sounded two weeks later at I stared uncomprehendingly at a ten-page "site plan application." Words that appeared to be English had no meaning or context. Unable to decipher the terminology, I was unable to break it into steps, much less accomplish them. The more I stared at the form, the less sense it made. Evidently this paperwork was foolproof.

In true family fashion however, I believed that my mother had even less of a grip on this than I did and she of course believed the opposite. After hours of unproductive labor, we turned on each other and had a whopper of a fight, the kind of family fight you vow sometime in your early twenties never to have again. The kind of fight in which each party ferociously defends her interpretation while secretly knowing she could be wrong but at the same time knowing the other must be more wrong. Finally we hobbled together a truce and a plan, which neither one of us thought would work, but exhaustion and a deadline forced us to compromise. Projects like this are not for the faint of heart.

I turned in the paperwork on time, my mother got the letters out on time, and finally it was Planning Board meeting night. We were nervous but prepared. Clutching a briefcase full of copies of the paperwork, detailed floor plans, additional zoning maps etc, we were called forward from the audience to meet with the nicest, most kindly group of people I have ever met. They reviewed our application and supporting paperwork, and it all seemed in order.

One second short of relief, they informed us that we had to file an additional special use permit application, mail out another series of letters, and appear again the following month. Perhaps seeing the panic in our eyes, they took pains to assure us that the work we had done was indeed necessary, and did not need to be duplicated (with the exception of the letters). Feeling sort of victorious, we left and started the whole process again the next day.

In the Meantime...

While waiting for the next month's Planning Board appearance, I spent a lot of time worrying about how little free time I really had to devote to this project and more humbling, how little I really knew or was willing to learn. After being a renter for over twenty years, I knew a lot about how to make do and patch up dwellings, but absolutely nothing about remodeling something of this magnitude. The learning curve was going to be steep enough without having to educate myself in the minutiae of the building trades.

Enter Dick Gordineer, an old friend with vast experience in repair and restoration of old buildings. Dick came up to take a look around the barn. He had done some repairs in my mother's house, which was built in 1800 as a stagecoach stop and needed regular upkeep.

Walking around the barn with Dick made it all seem doable, not the crazy idea it seemed sometimes. Dick's wealth of knowledge reassured me. I had been dithering about the heating system for some time, and he was able to explain the pros and cons of my options clearly and succinctly. It is easy to feel intimated or abysmally ignorant about the technical aspects of this project, and I feel no shame in admitting either, but at the same time I'm capable of understanding technical information when it's presented in layman's terms. I could ask Dick why the floorboards wouldn't catch on fire if they were heated from beneath. He didn't bat an eye, but simply explained why that was impossible.

I had complete confidence in Dick's abilities, but equally important, I had complete confidence in his genial good nature and lack of pretense or patronization. Once he agreed to be the general contractor, I felt I was finally on my way to creating a home. We mapped out a plan, starting with obtaining the special use permit at the Planning Board, then filing Board of Health paperwork for the water permit, then the well and the mechanics of the septic system. When all of those items were accomplished, we would map out the next steps.

Floor Plan

The barn is actually two barns joined together under one big roof so that it appears to be one building from the outside. The older side was probably built when the house was, in 1800, and the second side was added around 1875. Both sides are 832 sq feet each, and the upstairs loft is one large space over the two downstairs areas. There is a side structure attached to the "newer" side, which we have always referred to as the "coop," as in chicken coop. The barn rises to 27 feet at its peak. It's pretty big.

I decided to leave the shared wall between the two sides of the barn standing and renovate one side downstairs first, move in, and then tackle one upstairs side at a more leisurely pace. As only the two of us, my daughter and myself, will be living there, it didn't make sense to redo the whole building (and then have to heat it) when we really don't need over 3000 sq. ft of living space.

The plan was to utilize the older side because it was the more recently renovated space, with more windows and electrical outlets etc. Using an Internet site of floor plans (www.dreamhomesource.com), I was able to browse through many floor plans that were of the same size and specifications that I had to work with. (Less than 900 sq. ft., 2 bedrooms and on one floor) It was great fun to look at all the creative plans and I was surprised at what could be done in a relatively small space. In this era of oversized "McMansions" it was refreshing and I was inspired to draw my own floor plan, very specific to our needs.

I thought a lot about what was really important and came up with this:

• Must have eat-in kitchen (not a cook, so I could skimp on work space)

• Must have at least a tiny mud room (I have two dogs)

• Must have large coat closet to accommodate vast assortment of outwear (dogs again)

• Must have computer area separate from living room or kitchen

• Must have as many windows as possible

My daughter had learned CAD (Computer Aided Design) and was eager to design the floor plan I had sketched out. She is a senior in high school and set to study engineering this fall, so why not? (And the price was right) She did a brilliant job incorporating our needs into the existing space and it was thrilling to see what had previously been scratched out on notepaper take shape as a "real" floor plan.

One month later, I changed my mind and decided to start all over and use the other side and incorporate the chicken coop as my bedroom. There were several good reasons which were not apparent at the beginning of the project, probably because we all had tunnel vision about the older, "better" side. But the other side had the additional space the coop provided, and existing stairs to the loft area. Also the downstairs beams were still completely exposed on the "new" side, where they had been covered over by walls on the "old" side. Also the coop and the building made a nice shady square area outside that could easily be fenced in for the dogs. That side of the building is also more private, with not only one but two wonderfully quiet cemeteries, one to the side and one across the street, as neighbors. So I gave up the tiny piece of mountain view to be had on the original side in exchange for all that.

Planning Board Part II

After the drama of the first application and appearance, this second trip was actually anticlimatic. Of course my mother and I being who we are, we invented our own drama. It was raining and I wanted to drive but she wanted to walk. (It is only about 200 feet from her house to the town hall.) Then we disagreed about what time we were supposed to be there. I gave up and got in the car and she reluctantly joined me. (It was a draw: she was right about the walking, and I was right about the time.) We sailed through, were granted the special use permit and were introduced to the local zoning official, who would take over from here. This process had taken almost three months.

Cindy Reid lives in Red Hook. This is the first part of an ongoing series of reports on the progress of "The Barn Project."