SSOBB Blog Hop - Pig Farm Barn

This is part two of my contribution to the Secret Society of Barn Builders Blog Hop for Julie Sefton's book, Build-a-Barn.

Now, you have to know that Julie is my best friend. I love her to bits, which means I have no reservations about telling her exactly what I think. And while she was on her barn binge I kept telling her that I rarely saw barns where I lived in Southern NH.

It was only partly true. I lived in Manchester, NH's biggest city, for over 50 years. There aren't many barns left in the city proper. But the real story is I wasn't looking. I wasn't paying attention. Take this barn, above.

Sure, it looks creepy. The photo is from Google Maps and was taken on a cold gray day in mid-winter. This barn is located a half mile away from my mother's house. She lived on this road for twenty years and for twenty years whenever I visited my mother I drove by this barn. It wasn't like I could ignore it. It was a pig farm and it stank to high heaven. My son would hold his breath while we drove by.

Yet somehow I persisted in my ignorance of barns in the area where I lived.

Two months before Julie created the SSOBB, I bought my Mother's house. When Julie asked if I would build a barn, I thought of the Henniker barn. I was working on that barn when I drove by the pig farm barn and TAH DAH, it hit me. O HOLY CRAP, THERE'S A BARN A HALF MILE FROM MY HOUSE.

And... DAMMIT, IT'S PURPLE!

Inspiration hit.

I texted Julie, "Right down the road is a PURPLE barn -- gotta photograph that! The purple is asphalt siding and it looks greenish in the sunlight. It used to be a pig farm."

Julie texted back almost immediately, “No way re purple barn with pigs… The surprise barn I pulled fabrics for is a purple stripe with green/pink swirls for barnyard with pink flying pigs sky fabric… WHAT a coincidence!”

That did it. I simply HAD to make a purple barn.

 It went together so quick I don't have in process photos of it. The doors were the most distinctive part of this barn, so I took great care to try to indicate how fussy they really were. Many of the windows were broken, so I used a grey to indicate that one pane of glass was still intact.

Since the Google photo was taken, the barn has been renovated. Modern windows have replaced the old ones, and a new metal roof has been installed. The purple siding has been removed on all but the front of the barn's facade.

I decided to build the barn of my memory, and not to include the attached house. (The overwhelming majority of barns in New England are attached to houses via "outbuildings." These are great for comfort, because getting from the house to the barn in winter is very cold, but it also meant that if a barn burned down, the house often went with it.)

Since I had removed the house from the barn, I needed to set it in space, so I added a fence on both sides.

For the stockade fence surrounding the barn, I used a novelty fabric of rulers. Partly because I was lazy, but mostly because, hell, if you've got something in your stash that's so damn perfect, you USE IT! The green fabric was cut and then resewn together into "made fabric" to suggest the mountains in the far distance.

You don't see a lot of red barns in New Hampshire. Most of them are white, and yellow barns are common. But I've never seen another purple one anywhere.


You can read a bit more about these two barns here.

The entire SSOBB Blog Hop schedule can be found here. 


PS, the giveaway is still on. I will pick a name at random from the comments on Monday's post.