Old barns need love, too — lots of it

Renovating an old barn is a lot easier with modern tools, but it’s a lot more interesting because of the old ones.

“I have more appreciation of how much the old timers were able to do without the technology that we have today […] without scissor lifts or telehandlers or a crane or hydraulic jacks, you know all the work or power tools,” said Scott Morgan, pausing work to restore an old barn on property owned by the Patenaude family on Jewett Road in Hopkinton. “It’s still a struggle for me to do all the work with all this. If they were just using handsaws and adzes and hand bores […] that’s a lot of extra work.”

Like many old barns — New Hampshire has around 15,000 of them in various states of use, according to agricultural surveys — this one has had multiple lives as the farm moved through various crops, including dairy cows and hayfields.

It has expanded and shifted, so its age is hard to pin down, Morgan said: “It was in need of quite a few structural repairs.”

The current project, part of ongoing work throughout the property, began when the barn was jacked up about eight months ago, giving access to its aging fieldstone-and-granite foundation. The work is being done by Mike Kender of Timberhawk Carpentry with Morgan as one sub-contractor.

The goal: “Restore the old family barn to a degree where it’s still usable and viable as a three-season outdoor storage, covered storage, to give it the old life that it once had, a rejuvenation,” said Morgan.

You can’t shift one part of a timber frame barn without affecting all the other parts, from the siding to the windows to the headers and gables.

“That’s what’s really great about timber frames, every stick is there for a reason. Collectively, it holds the building together, but each one has a job, and it is doing its function,” Morgan said.

“It took a lot of time and energy to manifest these materials, right, from a tree to being raw timber that’s squared up and usable. So, they weren’t gonna spend any more energy than they had to. They were farmers, you know, and had not much money. At that rate, every single stick was there solely to do its function and nothing extra.”

Keeping barns in a useful state, or just keeping them standing, is an unending task. The New Hampshire Preservation Alliance offers grants of a few hundred dollars to help hire professional assessors to see what needs to be done, and many communities offer tax breaks for historic barns.