Why the Roof Had to be Red

When we started envisioning the buildings on the property, we wanted to have a timeless look…  A feeling that the buildings had been there for a hundred years or more.  My husband is an insomniac and spends hours in the middle of the night researching and investigating things.  The fact he does it on his phone is a relief because at least he’s still in bed with me.  But I digress.  Hours of research came up with the building material we would use:  larchwood.  It’s stronger and stiffer and has more structural integrity than many other building woods out there.  It is also rot resistant. But I’m a girl — what do I really care about?  What it looks like…  

After buying a standing larchwood forest in Pennsylvania and contracting an Amish sawmill (via an intermediary who is active in the New York Amish community), I finally got some pieces to look at.  Some were raw, some were aged.  And let me tell you…  This stuff is gorgeous!  Depending on the sun and weather exposure, it turns a beautiful silver blue gray.  It doesn’t have to be stained.  It can just go.  And when it hits the color you want, you can then seal it.  

The buildings planned for the property were a shed, a barndominium, and a main house.  The shed was first on the docket, so we had a place to store equipment.  Lugging grease guns and chainsaws back and forth from our home was no longer exciting.  We needed a place to store stuff.  It was planned as a 20 by 24 foot structure with a porch on one side and a peaked roof.  

We decided to look at seamed metal for roofing material.  Bruce, our roofing guy, came out to take a tour of the place to see what we had envisioned (he is also the uncle of our logging guy).  He gave me a stack of samples, which I took home and held against the samples of the larchwood, from new to old.  There is a beautiful color called Gallery Blue.  Whether on the golden-brown or the silvery-blue wood, it pulled out the undertones and was a perfect compliment to the larchwood.  Color locked.

Somewhere in all of this, I got a crazy idea to have an outhouse commissioned for the farm.  As it was the first building on the property and a project I controlled, it has the Gallery Blue roof.  It looks slammin’, as my kids would say.  

When it was time to order the roofing material for the shed, my husband was the one reading and signing orders.  Somehow Bruce wrote down Forest Green.  Not Gallery Blue.  Forest Green.  My husband signed it.  

The shed was going up.  I was not there when the roof material was delivered.  But my husband was.  Thankfully he gave me the heads up about the color being “wrong.”  When I got to the farm to see the shed with this Forest Green roof, I was not happy.  Not in a bratty kind of way.  It wasn’t the vision I had.  I mean I like green.  My birthstone is emerald for cryin’ out loud.  Green is one of my favorite colors.  But it wasn’t supposed to be the color of the shed’s roof.  

But that ship had sailed.  We (and by we I mean he) signed the purchase order.  It was there.  The money was spent.  So the shed has a Forest Green roof.

Now it’s time to start the build on the barndominium.  Keep in mind, we had already selected and modified the floor plan.  This thing went from looking huge to seeming small to being a massive structure.  It has a 70’x21’ “RV” tunnel, which will never see a recreational vehicle in its life.  In reality, it looks like you could park a semi in there.  It is attached to the rest of the building which has a footprint of 52’X41’.  The bottom floor is a garage, workspace, office.  The top is an “ADU” which stands for Accessory Dwelling Unit.  It has two bedrooms, two baths, a great room with a kitchen.  

As we are looking at things like windows and doors, my husband and I start to discuss the roof for the barndominium.  “What color would you like?” he asks.  I looked at him with a devilish grin and reply, “It’s a barn, babe.  What color do you think I think it should be?”  He looked at me and said, “No, you’ve got to be kidding.”  I said, “Nope.”  

Immediately I pull out the samples from Bruce.  Not terra cotta red.  Not brick red.  Fire engine red.  It’s actually called Patriot Red.  Because, well, it’s a barn.  

Oh and yes, the roll up doors and exterior doors will match.