We have been slowly cleaning out our 1893 barn, small outbuildings, and various junk piles here on the farm. Most of the time all we find is trash, but every once in a while we find a treasure. Here’s some neat stuff we found in the barn this week.

Michael and I have established a system for getting rid of the overwhelming amount of junk that seems to have accumulated over the past 121 years.

1. Every Monday night we cram as much stuff as we can into our two trash cans for Tuesday morning country trash pickup.

2. We now have three fire pits that we use in rotation every week. Burning stuff is actually quite fun, especially when turned into date night entertainment.

3. We break up the “cleaning” by doing a little each day as part of our routine. The whole family does it together and we try to make it fun for Cami Grace. To her it’s like a treasure hunt.

This vintage chicken water dispenser just needs a mason  jar on top and it will be perfect for our new arrivals (pray that my baby chicks don’t die in the mail).

I’m sure I can find some artsy thing to do with this old door latch.

I found this extra large horse shoe kinda buried in one of the stalls. I think it must  have been used on a plow horse. A cool piece of history!

I have already found a new life for this vintage milk crate as flip flop storage on the porch. Tucked under the bench, it corrals several pairs and cleverly keeps them out of sight.

This is a close up of the rotting OSB basket ball hoop which was attached to the barn. It took some serious elbow grease to rip it off but now we can burn this eye sore. The Barn is slowly starting to look like itself again.

Before                                                       After

I love our barn, I feel as if it is full of wonderful secrets waiting to be discovered. There will be a post showing the interior soon. I am going back and forth over whether we should paint it white again or traditional red. Any thoughts?