08/15/2026
First order of business in restoring this old barn was getting it structurally sound.
You can see some of the improvements in the photos from our last post, but we never shared what we actually started with. The first photo shows the foundation had given way beneath one of the sill beams that supported a major structural wall post. Once that support dropped, it pulled everything with it the wall, roof, and floor all began sagging toward the middle.
Getting it back where it belonged meant working underneath the barn with a series of hydraulic jacks, heavy cribbing, and a whole lot of patience. By the time we were finished, we had raised that sill beam and structural post roughly 12 inches, brought the center of the lower barn up about 6 inches, rebuilt part of the stacked stone foundation, and taken a significant amount of the slope out of the floor.
It's not perfectly level, but with an almost 200 year old timberframe barn, sometimes chasing perfectly straight and level can cause more damage than leaving a little of the character it's developed over the last two centuries. The goal is to make it solid, stable, and safe while preserving as much of the original structure as possible.
Sometimes “good enough” is exactly where an old building wants to be.
