A New Look for an Old Barn

The part I like best about the whole vintage/shabby chic "movement" is taking something old and giving it a beautiful new life.  My grandma was a furniture painter before it was cool, and I carried a purse to high school that my mom and I made out of an old pair of my dad's overalls.  (I'm still on the hunt for more old overalls, by the way!)

We've been giving new life to the barns at Jenny and Brian's farm -- a new roof on the chicken house, new floors, cleaning, repairing and painting -- making it all pretty for you when you come for the Barn Market!


Here is a picture of the dairy barn as it looked last week:

Fine, but concrete block just isn't very exciting, is it?

When Jenny and I traveled to NYC this spring, we made a visit to Pennsylvania to visit her sweet cousins, and we loved looking at the old historic barns with stone foundations that dotted the hills around Allentown.  I saw a lot of the same type barns on our vacation -- Iowa and Minnesota are both blessed with beautiful old barns.  So I thought, "Could we paint the block to look like stone?"  Turns out, we could!

 First, we power washed, then, we primed.  Just as an FYI, concrete block sucks up A LOT of primer!

Sherwin-Williams was having a 30% off sale last week, so I bought 4 quarts of latex paint, choosing colors by matching them to some photographs of barns and stone silos; I picked the bottom 4 colors from a color card, and started painting.

I really liked what was going on, but we wanted to pull some of the red from the barn roof, so back to SW for a quart of deep red, and we were all happy with the results.  

We also "whitewashed" the door with some Annie Sloane Chalk Paint mixed with water -- still "barny", but much cleaner-looking.  The mortar lines are also AS, mixed with a little brown.  

Of course, this is the short side of the barn -- we're making good progress on the LONG side, which faces the road.  Hoping to have it done this week!  

Georgie