04/12/2026
A few days ago a customer called with an unreasonable request.
Unreasonable requests are always from designers and architects who have zero understanding of reclaimed barn wood availability because they are profoundly ignorant of what kind of wood was used to build barns.
Conventional dairy barn strategy was to milk cows in the basement and store feed in the hay mow above the basement.
Standard dairy barns are 36-40 feet wide by 70-100 feet long. Side walls are 12'-16'.
The basement ceiling is the hay mow floor. The center of the hay mow is the thresher floor. This is where wagons were backed for unloading, where grain was threshed, and where work was done. The thresher floor patina is amazing.
The hay mow floor is held up with 8x8 to 12x12 posts. Above the posts are main beams, usually 8x to 12x. If only 8x, they often sag and bow. If 10x or 12x, they are usually straight.
Above the main beams are joists. Old barns have log joists called "sleepers." These are flat on the top and bottom, round on the sides, installed on 2' centers. Newer barns (1860-1910) have 3x8 rough sawn joists. Usually oak or pine, sometimes ash or elm.
Above the joists is the hay mow floor. This is often two layers of 1x random width of any species, or 2" material that is either tongue-and-grooved or slip-tongue. Tongue and groove is still common today, but slip-tongue went out of favor a hundred years ago. Slip-tongue is where both sides of the planks have a groove. The slip tongue is a 1/2" slat pounded into the first groove, then the second plank is pounded onto the slip tongue slat.
The hay mow is what we all know as a "barn."
Side wall posts are usually 8x8s, 12'-16' tall, spaced 10'-16' apart. Each side wall post has a mate on the other side of the barn, connected by the tie beam.
The tie beam will have at least one support post in the center of the barn. Stout barns have two support posts per tie beam, plus long diagonal braces.
The side wall and end wall posts are connected to each other with nailers. Hand hewn barns might have round, 1/4 round, or 2-sided round nailers. They might also have rough-sawn nailers. Usually at least 3" thick, often 4" thick.
Above the tie beams, the side wall posts are topped with a roof plate beam. The edges are usually notched ever 2' to cup the rafters.
Halfway from the top of the wall to the peak of the roof, held up by posts that start at the tie beam, is the rafter notch beam. The rafter notch beam and the roof plate beams are as long as the barn. These are usually the nicest, straightest beams in the barn.
Some of the older hand-hewn barns have round rafters. They are sistered together at the rafter notch beam. They are pinned at the peak. It is extremely unusual to have any kind of ridge beam.
The rafters are decked with 1x random width planks. Some roofs have planks butted up to each other. Others have space between each plank.
Every joint is braced. The side posts have 4"x4"x4' diagonal braces to the roof plate and the tie beams. The center posts are braced to the tie beams. The rafter notch beams are braced from the tie beam and the rafter notch support beams. It's not unusual to have double-braces, where the first brace is 4' long and the second is 6'. Many barns also have 6x, 8x, or 10x diagonal braces up to 12' long. These are locate above and below the tie beams and in each corner.
Good barns are still good because of the roof. The oldest barns have shakes nailed to the roof boards, then, later, steel fastened to the shakes. The best barns were given standing seam steel roofs over a hundred years ago. If the roof goes, the barn goes. If the roof leaked, the barn is probably rotten, or there will be significant parts of the barn that are unstable.
If the barn had a good roof, and the foundation held up, we might be able to dismantle it as a kit. We peel the siding and the roof off. We tag every single post, beam, brace, nailer, and rafter. Then, more carefully than your own baby jesus, we pull each piece off so that we can reassemble it later.
Each type of material, each species, has its own flavor. Without knowing anything about modern physics, the Amish who specialize in reclaimed barn wood have come up with descriptors that are similar to how physicists describe quarks and muons. Siding is either rough-back or smooth-back. Smoothback is graded by color: solid red, red, faded red, super-faded red, antique grey. Roughback is just roughback. Widths are 6", 7" shiplap, 8", 9" shiplap, 10", 11" shiplap, 12", and random. Smoothback is usually 3/4". Roughback is usually 7/8" to 1". Most roughback can be planed to 3/4" but some is too thin for 3/4 so we plane it to 5/8". It's common for us to have a 50% loss factor when we mill siding. I tell everyone to expect a 50% loss.
Whenever possible, we put the material into homogenous bunks and then sell it as-is. If the material isn't good enough to sell as-is, we either leave it at the original barn, or we mill it. Leaving it is the biggest power move we ever make.
Beams are graded based on side-integrity, corner integrity, and core integrity. 4-sided good, and 3-sided good with three good corners, are #1. One bad side and two bad corners are #2. Two bad sides are #3. Depending on species, length, and our eye, we might sell a #2 as a #2, or we might skin it and then mill the core into 1" blanks. Beams graded as #3 get skinned and, if there is enough integrity to the core, it will be milled into 1" blanks. The skins are sold as skins and the blanks are either milled into flooring by us or sold to other mills for flooring and paneling. Sleepers are similarly graded, and usually milled into skins and blanks.
Full-dimension 2-sided rough 2x are either sold as-is, or split into 1" planks for flooring and paneling. Our biggest labor issue is finding people to de-nail and metal detect, which is crucial prior to milling.
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