Reclaiming the Barn

I have taken on a huge, daunting project...converting our barn back to being a barn. Yes, from the outside it does look like a barn and it does on the inside, too. But somehow we have turned our barn into a very large storage unit and a mouse housing project.

When we first purchased our place we used the barn for what it was purchased for. We housed our two goats and a guard llama in it. I could never coax any of our steers into it though, I think because of the concrete floor but I left the big door open just in case they overcame their fear.

Then in 1999 we converted the barn to a serigraph studio and printed my husband's art work. After the arrival of our daughter in 2002 we decided to contract out to have the art prints made. We sold all the printing equipment and just started using the barn for storage mostly. I did raise meat chickens in the barn and raise chicks out there but that has been about it.

We have three sheds converted to poultry houses which has worked great for our free-ranging poultry. Now I would like to have a nice place to raise some purebred chickens like the silkies that we are hatching.

Here are some pictures of the poultry housing that we have set up already.

The barn is huge and heated, too. As you can see it needs a new roof in the worst way. We are hoping to roof it with metal this year or at least purchase the material since the bottom fell out on a lot of building materials right along with real estate prices.
I'm currently going through all the stuff right now and finding things we forgot we even had. To start we are building three poultry pens in the south end of the barn. An area we actually have kept clear of stuff. I will post some interior pictures once we have those built out. It's too embarrassing to post interior pics right now :)