My Brother the Barn Builder

 My brother has been a carpenter for 27 years and he is also a fine furniture maker. Here he is in front of his cabinet of planes and chisels in his workshop.

He built the shop, of course. It's a post and beam building, just like the barn. The tax guys in the town where he lives call this a "detached garage." I gather this means it's taxed differently. My brother says they chuckle when they say it.

This is his shed. A shed isn't taxed as a building if it is less than 200 square feet. This one is 192 square feet, or 12' x 16'. I asked what was in the shed. "All the stuff that keeps my workshop clean."

This is the barn. It really is a barn.

It houses his & his wife's horse,

their chickens,

and a whole lot of hay. The barn is a post and beam building. It won't collapse in this century, or probably even the next. My brother said he wanted his barn to be low.

It's funny, he was managing a lumber yard when he built the barn. "I couldn't afford the material I used to build it if I had to build it now," he said. "I got terrific prices from our vendors, like the skylights in the roof."

What I find so interesting about these three buildings is how they reflect each other. You can tell the same person designed and built them.

So what's the big deal about this barn? When my brother received the family calendar I sent for Christmas which featured the quilts I made in the last two years, he and my SIL asked if they could trade a small piece of his woodwork for the Flight of Fancy quilt. I don't want to give that quilt away, so I suggested that instead I make a bird quilt based the things around Colorado where they live. This trip provided me with a great opportunity to "scope things out" and get ideas for their bird quilt. I'll make a lot of birds for this quilt, but I also want to add my brother's barn.