Barn Project

A few of my Indy friends were in town earlier this fall, and I took them to a neighborhood-wide garage sale. Poor things, they ended up carrying some of my purchases back. I hadn't yet told them that I was pregnant, so my purchase of a wooden barn (along the same lines as a dollhouse) struck them as puzzling. "You could use it to hold your shoes," said one.

My plan was to fix it up and give it to my dad, a farmer and occasional cowboy, to have at home for when his someday grandchildren visited. It looked pretty sad when I bought it, a bit mildewed and weather-beaten, but I had a vision.

One weekend before my dad's birthday, I sat down and got to painting. I used acrylic paint I already had on hand in a dark red, black-brown, grey, and white. It took about 3/4 of a small bottle of each to paint the whole surface, which was lucky because I have no idea if I could have matched that paint in a store since it was leftover from other projects long finished or abandoned. I used scotch tape to make the straight white lines around all of the openings and hand painted the curves.

You can see the paint bottles behind the barn.
I also used the masking tape to keep the red paint off the roof and
floor and to keep the roof color off the walls. I painted the lightest
color (the floors) first so I could be messy with that one.

 

I even bought some tiny plastic farm animals from a market in Italy to help populate the barn and found an old tractor online. I also found some tiny hay bales at Michael's, which I just couldn't pass up. They were super messy though, so I finally covered them in glue (which dries clear) so they'd stop leaving hay everywhere. We took the barn home to my dad on Thanksgiving, and I'm pretty sure it was a hit. (The cats loved it, anyway!)

My little barn cats.