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Ohio barn becomes Colorado man's home
'Every stick in this place got salvaged and reused'
Sunday, May 04, 2008
STRASBURG, Colo. — Ken Hanks' five-year odyssey of turning an Ohio barn into his home near Denver began with a trip to a local bookstore.
While browsing the home improvement section, he picked up a book on barns and began thumbing through it, studying the timbers that formed the barns' skeletons.
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"I just became fascinated with it," said Hanks, a 49-year-old veterinarian. "It stirred my imagination to think how the old-timers would put these things up."
A few days later, he came back to the store and bought the book.
Ad begins adventure
Hanks' wife, Dyanne Caprio, spotted the classified advertisement in the Denver Post. But while she loved barns, she wasn't sure about living in one.
"She thought a little bit before she told me about it," Hanks said. "She knew I'd get kind of fired up, and I did."
Hanks had been exploring old barns in Colorado since buying the barn book a few years earlier. But timber-frame barns were far less plentiful in the state than in the East.
"Out here, we don't have the old-growth forest with hickory and oak and ash trees," Hanks said. And the climate was more arid, making it better suited for keeping hay outside. "Consequently, I think the need to build some of these great barns went away."
Once he convinced his wife that they could make a home out of an old barn, they looked at one in western Illinois. But it already had been disassembled and had deteriorated.
Months later, Caprio showed her husband the classified ad in the Denver Post placed by Marion and Michael Rogers, a father-and-son team from rural Miami County whose business ranges from reclaiming old timber frames to making trim and furniture from old lumber.
In July 2002, Hanks and a friend, architect Mark Donnelson, flew into Dayton International Airport and rented a car to go size up the barn.
Hanks remembers pulling up to the barn on Bill and Sandy John's farm near Wapakoneta. The Ohio landscape was lush, the day was hot, and Hanks was a bit underwhelmed by what he saw: a nondescript bank barn measuring 40 feet by 60 feet.
"It wasn't what I would call spectacular," he said.
Once inside, though, he grew excited as he listened to Michael Rogers and Donnelson talk of the possibilities. The barn's seven bents, or cross-sections — a large number for a barn of its size — towered overhead.
A couple weeks later, Hanks sent the Rogerses a down payment on the barn.
Bringing down the barn
Bill and Sandy John's barn had never turned many heads in the neighborhood.
That all changed in the summer of 2002, when workers pressure-washed the barn's skeleton, then began dismantling it timber by timber. Neighbors pulled over and watched the barn come down.
"It created a little bit of a sensation," Sandy John said. "I think they couldn't believe that someone would want it clear out there."
Bill John said the Johns received $8,000 for the barn.
When Marion and Michael Rogers saw the Johns' barn, they knew they were becoming stewards not of a white elephant, but of a unique structure.
"There was just an excessive amount of timber — more than we typically see," said Michael Rogers, 28. "It was just built very, very strong."
The barn had more than 200 knee braces, or angled supports. And it had seven "bents," or cross-sections, each weighing between 2,800 and 7,000 pounds.
Marion Rogers, 59, said the barn was extraordinarily well-built.
"The builders who built this were craftsmen," he said. "They were accurate in their work, and they did it by hand. This is a testament to the timber frame craft of years gone by."
The Rogerses shipped the disassembled barn west by semi at a cost of $8,000 to $10,000, Michael Rogers said.
Re-raising the barn
Two years later, the barn's timber frames were pieced together. When high winds weren't blowing across the Colorado plains that August, a crane raised the giant frame atop a concrete foundation with a stone veneer.
The barn had not had a stone foundation in Ohio, but Hanks opted for one. A tumbler, or huge metal drum, dulled the edges of the rocks used to give them an older look.
The frame sat open through the winter of 2004-05. During 2005, workers sealed up the barn with insulated panels, then covered them with the barn's old wood siding.
Hanks also wanted the barn's roof to have the right look, both from inside and outside. So the Rogerses started by laying a layer of metal visible through the rafters from below. They then placed insulated panels on the metal and finally put the barn's old metal roof atop those panels.
The barn still has many original touches. The stringers, or side pieces of the open stairways, are hand-hewn. And Michael Rogers fashioned a walnut post from the barn's basement into a fireplace mantle, into which he inscribed "1876." That's the year Colorado became a state, and it's believed to be about the time the barn was built.
The main floor boards, a mixture of hardwoods — such as ash, white oak, hickory, elm and beech — came from the old barn.
Oak flooring in the barn's loft was left "woolly and rough-sawn" underneath; it was salvaged from an old Shelby County church built in the 1880s.
"Every stick in this place got salvaged and reused," said Michael Rogers, who also made custom cabinetry, doors and a dining room table for the barn-turned-residence.
The converted barn's 26-foot-high great room has an enormous chandelier fashioned from cleated steel tractor wheels. A 250-watt incandescent bulb is fitted inside one wheel's hub.
Hanks admits his friends were skeptical at first that a barn could be converted into a quality home. But, since moving in last December, he and his wife have hosted parties, and "almost everyone thought it was unique and pretty darn cool."
"I think we should get a gold star for how well we've preserved the character of it," he said.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-7457 or bsutherly@DaytonDailyNews.com.
Other local
barn movings
There have been other local barn movings of note. The Civil War-era Hertzler barn, built in Miamisburg off Springboro Pike near the Dayton Mall, was disassembled and re-erected in 2007 at George Rogers Clark Park in Springfield. And the Muhlhauser barn, whose slate roof sports an 1881 date, was relocated to Beckett Park in West Chester Twp. It opened to the public March 30, and may be reserved for parties.
