Your Barn House
Why should someone convert a barn into a country villa? While these ungainly spaces may not offer either immediate comfort or convenience, they provide soaring ceilings and luxurious, lofty areas. And with the diminution of American farming in recent decades, barns have indeed been gentrified into havens for city folk seeking to combine plain needs with rural romance. So how to acquire one? The Cobbs ( How to Buy and Remodel the Older House ) answer the question with simple solutions: buy property with a feasible barn on it; buy a barn outright, dismantling and reassembling it on your own property; or buy a barn "kit" and make one from scratch. The Cobbs maintain their enthusiasm for the barn throughout the book; advice is often brief but to the point. The mysteries of land purchase and of wheeling and dealing with the bank, attorneys and contractors are presented in a very elementary fashion. Yet 20 case histories of people who have taken the plunge add a great deal in hands-on and abstract knowledge--why they decided to do it, how they accomplished it, what the barn ended up looking like and how it finally worked. These examples are even-handedly spread from East to West coasts, giving geographic and climatic differences full play.Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.