The Barn...

For the past few months we've been trying to find my husband a job, him being a brand new nurse and all. It's proving to be a very difficult task. We knew that it would be, but it's so frustrating, really. Who wouldn't want to hire a 6'4", strong, handsome male nurse who graduated the top of his class? I know that it's a very competitive job market, but we are really hoping that something works out soon. So our days right now consist of filling out applications, going to interviews, and trying to fill in the rest of our days with something semi productive. You know that saying, "Work like everything depends on you and pray like everything depends on the Lord." Yup, that pretty much sums up what we are trying to do right now.

After Christmas ended and life wasn't so full and festive anymore, I decided we (okay - mainly he...) needed a good project to fill up some of this time we have on our hands. We decided to make the barn I've been dreaming about for quite a while.

We are lucky in that we are staying with my in laws right now (they are so so great!) and my father in law had most of the stuff we needed in his garage. All of the lumber we used is stuff that he had sitting around. We used scraps from the canoe he built over the summer for the trim work and fences and the main structure of the barn was made out of a piece of plywood he had leaning against the wall. The only stuff that we bought was the red paint ($3 sample can at Home Depot) and the hardware. It came to less than $20 to put this barn together.

And here it is...

There is a barn that we drive by a lot out here that has a ram skull over the door and I love it! Husband found this bull skull that is suppose to be a ceiling fan pull. My boy was scared of it until I told him it was going to scare all the Gremlin's from coming into the barn (yes... my husband let my 4 year old boy watch Gremlin's and life has not been the same since). Now he's okay with it.

We made it as a tri-fold where the sides open up at the back. The back wall is all open windows. The windows on the side work really well as handles to move this big barn around.

I also love the roof. The shingles are not individual shingles glued down, but rows of faux shingles that my husband made. But I love that we got the look of individual shingles without the hassle of doing it that way.

Here is the inside when the barn is opened up.

I thought about painting the inside but then husband pointed out that barns are never painted on the inside. They are usually left just raw wood. So I just painted the fencing that we did to make it stand out more. I actually like that you can see the black stamped words that were on the plywood.

We did three stories. Two with stalls and then an upper loft. Some of my favorite features are:
- The hoist in the center to pull the animals up to the second level.
- Real tree branches that we used as support beams for the different floors.
- Rope with little hooks to keep the animals in their stalls.

We had a great time making the barn! I absolutely love it. It was a lot of work, but so worth it to have this awesome barn for my boy to play with. We need to gather some more barn animals and little hay bales for it but that will come with time.  We are also going to build some little fences that can be used on the outside of the barn.

I found myself staring at it on the floor the other night, so happy with how it turned out. It reminded me that if you work really hard at something that you can make your dreams a reality. That may sound corny, but I have been dreaming up this barn for a while and now it's here. We are fighting hard to make another dream of ours a reality. We aren't giving up on our dream to live back in Utah with our families again yet. We've given up a lot to try and make this work. I don't know if it's going to pan out the way that we want it to, but we aren't done fighting for it yet! Fingers are triple quadruple crossed that someone will take a chance on my sweet husband. I mean, the man made a beautiful barn out of scraps of cast off wood. He is such a great hard worker. He works hard at everything he does, and whoever hires him will be so lucky that they did, I'm 100% sure of that. Until then, I need to figure out a new project for us. Or just enjoy playing with my my son's new barn for the time being.