Somewhere around year thirty of our marriage, my husband asked me a question that seemed to come out of left field. “Would you live in a barndominium?” he said. “What’s a barndominium?” I responded. Once he explained and showed me a few pictures online, I took a deep breath and said, “I would live anywhere with you.”
Over the next several months, we cleaned, painted, repaired, and prepped our house for listing. This was not just any house to me. The white house with the big front porch was the house where we had raised our three children. They had all flown the nest by this point, but I could still see them everywhere I looked. The thought of leaving the place that held so many memories gave me pause, but the idea of rattling around in that big house as we grew old gave me pause as well. Ultimately, we said, “We’ll put the house on the market and see what happens.” That made sense, right? If we didn’t get a buyer, we would just stay and know it wasn’t meant to be. We had a buyer in three weeks.
We moved into my mother’s basement thinking we would be there about a year. That sentence makes me laugh because we fully know now how much we didn’t know then. It took almost three years to get out of that basement and into our not completely finished Barndo.
Were there many difficult times during our build? Yes.
Have we learned how to do things we didn’t know we could? Also yes.
Did I ever regret going against my conservative, practical nature to encourage my husband’s free spirited dreams? At times.
But now, on evenings when the garage door between our living room and screened porch is open and the fresh country air is pouring in, I have to admit it was worth it.
We hear the neighbor’s agitated rooster crow at 10pm, and we laugh as their donkey brays to join in.
We drink hot coffee on cool mornings on a screened porch we painstakingly built with our own hands. And I realize that this season of our marriage has become one of the sweetest so far.
Maple Ridge Barndo 