If you are new to WillowBee, you may not know that we just recently built a brand new barn to serve as our workshop for our sign making business. This is literally a dream come true for me and something I never even thought imaginable when I first started this business. From starting in our home garage to now having a dream workshop…it’s still something I can’t even believe, honestly.
So Why a barn and not just a metal shed?
We often get asked why we chose to build a barn to serve as our workshop. When it came down to making the decision to finally build our own space, I told Tyler…if we are doing this, I am doing it right the first time and building exactly what I want. And exactly what I wanted was a barn. 🙂 I don’t know that there is really a definitive answer, I have just always loved post and beam barns and I think this stems from growing up exploring my grandma Beethe’s barn and various other out buildings they had on the farm. I have SO many memories from her farm and barn, and who knows, maybe the nostalgia is what made me want to build ours.
Fun fact, the barn on her farm was built in the early 1900’s and the image below was taken in 1912. It was the traditional mortise and tenon construction secured together with hardwood pegs. Below are a couple of pictures. The one of us kids (my cousin Lindsay, brother Spence, me, and other brother, Lance) was taken by my cousin and hung in my grandmas kitchen for as long as I can remember. This was actually walking into an old chicken coop on the farm, but has always been one of my favorite photos of us as kids.
The memories I have of being out there and exploring her barn are irreplaceable and while our barn doesn’t quite serve the same purpose, I can only hope we can make some of the same memories in ours. So while it may have been more conventional (and probably a lot cheaper! :/ ) to build a metal shed, I have absolutely zero regrets in our decision to build what we did.
Stay tuned for some later posts where I will dive in to HOW we actually went about figuring out the layout, dimensions, size, etc…
This was taken in 1993/94 timeframe.
Erin! Great start with your blog! I love this post. It reminds me of my dads family in Nebraska. We use to go out there every 3 years for family reunions and they are some of the best memories of my life. The old family barn was taken down several years ago, but when we came out for the reunion that year we all had an opportunity to choose a piece of the barn to keep. I grew up in Southern California and I LOVED whenever we got to come out and visit with family. We would sit on the porch with my great aunt and drink lemonade. I soaked up every moment of those visits. Thanks for sharing your family’s history!