Next time my kid leaves a door open, don’t bother to ask is he was raised in a barn. The answer will be – yes. Converting old barns into houses is all the rage in the UK right now. As farm kid, I love the idea of living in a barn, plus old building come with lots of character and quirks.
Our street address is “Low Fold Barn”.
This country builds things to last. It helps that the most common building material here is stone. There is nothing easy or cheap about dismantling and disposing of a stone structure. Therefore, converting and renovating is more common that building new homes.
Our neighbor’s house was built in 1864 and isn’t considered to be a particularly old structure. The traditional building material here is Yorkshire Sandstone. It’s a harder more durable version many other sandstones. The stone contains a mix of quartz, mica, feldspar, clay and iron oxides. This product of Yorkshire quarries came into prominence across England over 300 years ago, but it’s been in use in this area since the Middle Ages. It’s used in building and in paving.
This conversion was completed in the past year, so we are the first people to live in it. The history of the barn isn’t well known. According to my landlord, the plat from 1751 doesn’t show this barn. His father bought the farm in 1960 and it was an “old barn” then. Researching the history of this place will appear on my to-do list! Landlord Barry could tell me that this barn has been added on to at least three time. Evidence is this can be seen in the color and patterning variations in the stone exterior.
The house is now an L shaped structure. When they started the conversion, the back section had to be torn down and rebuilt because it wasn’t structurally sound. It now contains the kitchen on the main floor and the master and bath on the upper floor. The exterior walls are solid stone and vary from a foot and half to two feet think. The interior has been framed and sheet rocked to give it a modern look and smooth walls, even with there isn’t a square corner in the entire place. I’ve had the chance to chat with the landlord and his builder that did much of the work on house and they have great stories to tell about what they went through to turn a hand-built relic of a barn into a modern home.
The section on the left is the kitchen and the master bedroom and bath above.
The front of Low Fold Barn
Low ceilings can make it interesting…
There is a 6 ft. height maximum in the master bathroom.
A few inches to the left of the toilet will cause a headache.
The walls are 18 to 24 inches thick!
There is a lot of variation in wall thickness and nary a straight cornet in the entire place.
The attic/third floor is finished into an interesting space.
Many of the differences we deal with living here aren’t specific to living in a barn. They are the intrinsic to most homes in the U.K. Built in closets are a rarity here. In addition to dresser, large freestanding wardrobes are used to store hanging clothes. Not owning wardrobes and having a master bedroom that is tucked under a sloping roof line, we decided to have custom wardrobe units built to maximize our storage capacity. I even had the carpenter built removable strike plates for shoe storage! The slope of the roof still results in heads bumping on the ceiling but it’s much better than it was. The upside to our bedroom being in a dormer is that the rain on the slate roof above our heads is a lovely way to fall asleep. The master bathroom is also affected by the sloped room. Nobody over 6 ft tall would want to use it.
Living in old stone building presents challenges that those living in modern construction just don’t experience. Garages are rare. Attached garages are nearly unheard of in this country. Many of the houses here were built before cars were invented.
Thick stone walls are a serious detriment to cell phone reception and wifi signal. Our kitchen is a dead zone and sometimes the Wi-Fi can’t even make it through the interior walls. Open floor plan living has only recently arrived in this country and isn’t widely used, but we are lucky to have a big open room that serves as dining and living room. I had never heard of condenser clothes dryers before moving to England. Two foot stone walls make it tricky to vent a dryer (I’ll There will be an entire post on the oddities of doing laundry here.
Low ceilings and doorways are the norm. They did a good job of making all the doors standard height in here. We are stuck with an extremely low sloping roof in the master and the attic rooms.
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