Okay Dukai. If you’ve been following along on social media, you may have noticed that we’re quickly converting half the barn into a summer “clubhouse” for the kids (you know, like a treehouse but on the ground surrounded by farm animals). Our kids are not really at camps anymore (except for a few) and we have a great property for many neighborhood kids to come all summer long and play. But since Gretchen and I still work from here many days, they can’t really run around our house making noise. We always knew the outbuilding would be where we would eventually work, but the other outbuildings are complete six-figure renovations and the barn is a fun/quick fix. So we deal with it first in hopes of creating some distance between us and the weird gang of neighborhood kids. Elliot had the wise comment, so she said, “Wait, since you’re only two years old and there’s a lot of kids, why don’t you practice here and all us kids get the big house?” And I thought to myself, “Uh… er…” So while we call it ‘the club’, there’s a 30% chance that this will be where I work when the kids are done if they’re not playing outside and an 80% chance we’ll train there. In the fall when children come home from school. All I knew was that it was an empty space and didn’t need a lot of work to make it very functional, so I designed it as a kids’ club this summer and a flexible space in the long term.
I tried to start the club last year (hence the stickers and craft materials) but with no electricity and with all the spiders, the kids understandably treated it like a garbage fort (which is fine, but they could really use a place to do crafts and listen to loud music). Our contractor offered $5-10K to add insulation, make the window bigger, add panels, lots of outlets, add some pendants, and redo the flooring.
He is very cute and has a lot of potential. I’m not too concerned with how we do this mostly to save time and money because we have bigger fish to fry. If Brian had been handy or if I had the time we could have totally done this ourselves, but my days are so full as it is, adding this to my DIY palette would actually be silly.
I should note that there is a huge second half of the barn that accommodates all of our feed, hay, and where the animals sleep. It’s one of the reasons we went to this simple, rustic, cheap place here because if we decided to make it more than just an actual working farm, this would be a barn again. That’s why we didn’t want to install drywall or put in new flooring.
to update! And where are we now?
Well, we had a carpenter add insulation and cover the walls with pine core boards we bought from Home Depot and Lowes (1x6x10). It costs about $2k in materials. This photo was taken yesterday and I’m now noticing the frame around the windows which I might ask them to change to have beveled edges, but overall I like the look of it (I think Scandi mountain houses are full of all the pine trees and that’s kind of the case).
Oh I feel so happy. In the back, I want to make a large work/craft table with some basic benches that we’re setting up to fit. Then maybe an articulated sconce and some cute chairs.
We also want a seating area (the kids are obsessed with jamming to AJR, Imagine Dragons, and Olivia Rodrigo) and you know what wouldn’t be here? Screens of any kind (except MP3 players for podcasts and music selection). We struggle with YouTube and video game obsession (which we feel like we don’t do much of, but oh my goodness, it’s a daily battle we won’t have this summer). Gosh, maybe I’ll buy them a CD player so they can play all their old Death Cab For Cutie and Modest Mouse CDs. Maybe we will have a mini fridge so they won’t bother us so much for snacks and drinks. The plan is for them to be either out or in the club from 9am to 12pm (when we take most of our calls) and then they can come in to make their own lunch and then head back out.
Now I didn’t clear the entire design plan (it wasn’t a big priority TBH) but here are some things I like that look kid-friendly and nice for us to work there. Nothing will be permanently installed because every space in my entire life has to be a potential shooting space too, and who knows, we might have a client who wants us to turn this barn into a bathroom with a big bathtub or a winter wonderland for the holidays 🙂
More to come in the near future. And yes, it is rustic with lots of seams and knots. This is intentional because it’s still a barn (and we didn’t want to spend dough on clear pine). I think once everything is done (and the floors sanded and sanded) it will be nice and simple and fun for the kids (and basic enough for us to transform in the fall).
Thanks to Ken and JB for helping run this little project while they are very busy doing other projects (like the River House for example). No, they typically don’t do this small, but if you have a full house renovation in Portland, I can definitely recommend Sierra Custom Construction (and obviously ARCIFORM for more restoration jobs).
