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Reclaimed Barn Beam Installation 150 150 Administrator

Reclaimed Barn Beam Installation

Enjoy a look at how we cut and manually install 400-pound reclaimed barn beams into a custom design-build home. Even one of our architects gets a taste of the “build” side of design and build!

Enjoy our video series of this new construction design-build in progress!

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TRANSCRIPT

Hi Tom Kenny, Scott Simpson Design + Build. Today, we’re gonna be reusing these old barn beams to put in this new house. These beams were reclaimed from a barn outside of Stockton, Illinois. They’ve been taken apart and shipped to us. We’re actually gonna put them into this new house as accent pieces between the kitchen and the family room.

These are like the the old beams that carried the second floor of the old barn. These are twenty feet long. We’re gonna cut them so that they’re six inches deep. We’re gonna cut these and make some more legs. And, one of the extra pieces we’re gonna use as a mantlepiece for the fireplace.

It was probably a lot bigger, so this is likely a 60 or 75-year old tree. This mortis held up a timber floor and that mortis was built by a carpenter 125 years ago. Just like us on a cold day out in like, you know, a rural area. There’s like a pencil line from a carpenter. It’s kinda cool to see, sort of, the heritage of the beams and we’ll keep that intact as we put them into the new house.

We’ve taken a big circular saw. We’ve cut a curve through the beam. And now we’re gonna take a chainsaw, we’re gonna split it in half. Beautiful couple pieces of wood right there – all by just splitting it in half, instead of throwing it in the garbage. We’re gonna cut them up outside so we can actually carry them in without risk of injury.

This is the way that Romans did it. No crane necessary. Crane. Crane. Crane. Crane. I think it’s probably 350 pounds, maybe 400. Come on. Alright here we go.

Danny the architect is gonna help press this up to the top. Rick, our punch-list guy is going to uh, put the dead man in and Matt’s gonna make sure everything goes okay. He’s the head of the grounds here. That’s the way we like to do it around here – have the architects help build things.

There’s columns that go here and they line up. They all line up. So that the columns and the post look like they’re holding the beam up. The beam looks like it’s holding up the building, which is what gives us the effect of it being like part of the structure. The laser shoots a perfectly plumb circular line, so they hit the laser line on that side. Now, they’re gonna shift the beam over so it hits the laser on this side and then the beam will be perfectly square to the building.

Alright, so our client this vision of putting barn beams between their kitchen and their family room. We cut ‘em up, brought ‘em over here and hung ‘em up. All done.