Finished Barn

Ellie's barn is done and the biggest miracle of the season is it fit in the car to get to Florida!

Here's where we left off..I didn't have the roof one yet and I was preparing it for staining. Derrick and I decided the red stain with a black roof would look more playful which is what we were going for.

I'd never worked with this tinted wood stain before but I decided to give it a whirl. I liked that the wood grain would still show through the color.

Once the barn was stained, I added the roof. It's just 1/4" plywood cut to size. You can kind of see the woodgrain in this picture. I think it made it look a little more hand-made which I like.

 A lot of the versions of the barn just left the roof as plywood sheets but a few others used shims to create shingles for the roof. I loved that look so that's the route I went. It took forever....like probably 5 hours total to shingle the roof. So keep that in mind if you attempt this.

I just attached 6-7 shims at varying distances on top of each other and glued them into place with gorilla wood glue. The glue is strong...the shingles aren't going anywhere. When the shims got to be about 4 shims high I was able to shoot a nail into them for good measure but I only did about one nail per row of shingles.

Cutting the top of the shims off for the roof line was the hardest part.

One side done!

 Second side done!

This was about the time where I'd stared at the barn for too long and was thinking it wasn't looking good. Thankfully, once all the paper came off and I was done, I was happy with it. 

I only got one picture of it done and with doors on! I can't believe it....but I think I was so happy to be finished in time for Christmas that I wasn't thinking about anything else. Here is the final picture. 

The roof got a coat of stain and the entire thing got two coats of poly. The doors are on hinges so they open and close and I even added latches so the horses can be locked up safely for the night. 

This thing was huge! Larger than 2ft x 2 ft and I was so nervous it wasn't going to fit in the back of Derrick's grandma's civic but it did! And I'm so happy because shipping it was going to cost a fortune! Derrick and I hope Ellie loves it!