{"id":3541,"date":"2026-03-09T19:25:03","date_gmt":"2026-03-09T19:25:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/?p=3541"},"modified":"2026-07-01T19:31:53","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T19:31:53","slug":"the-romance-of-a-barn-strikes-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/the-romance-of-a-barn-strikes-again\/","title":{"rendered":"The romance of a barn strikes again"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you’ve been following my real estate adventures (follies?), you may recall that I had an extended dalliance with the idea of buying a farmhouse with a barn<\/a> in Upstate New York last summer. I fell in love with the idea, but researched it and estimated costs of repairs and was overwhelmed with the idea of taking on restoration of a barn<\/a>, maintenance on a house, and the need to gut a second house on the property. It seemed like a project that would consume all of my time and money, but there was still a strong attraction to the idea, and I dragged out a decision over a couple months. Finally, the property did sell to someone else, and even though I knew it was probably for the best that I missed out on it, it still made me a little sad, like I had lost an opportunity.<\/p>\n

So, fast forward to winter of 2026, and I see another farmhouse and barn on the market, this time in western New Jersey not far from Frenchtown. And unlike the beat-up and ready-to-crumble barn of the Upstate New York property, this barn looked pretty good. The farmhouse looked okay, it definitely needs a lot of work, but of course I was drawn to this beautiful red barn. And, how about this idea: there is a second red barn on the property! A farmhouse, one big red barn, a smaller red barn, all on two acres of land. It’s surrounded by another 50 acres of land, which I had been told has been set aside as preserved land for the next 85 years. So no concern about a developer coming in and building 25 McMansions in my backyard, if I were to buy it. <\/p>\n

\"a
A view of the 2nd smaller barn and the edge of the farmhouse.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So I had to go see it … and I did, in early March. Unlike the property in Upstate New York, which had a beautiful farmhouse and beat-up barn, this one in western New Jersey had a mediocre farmhouse and a great barn. The farmhouse was a bit tricky to assess in that the original structure, dating to around 1900, had two more-modern additions on either end, and at some point an owner decided to split off part of it into a separate apartment. So, in order to see the whole farmhouse, I had to go in one end and look around, then go back outside and down to the other end to enter and look around. It wouldn’t be a big deal to re-open the wall that had been sealed, but since I have no interest in having a tenant, by pushing this back to a single family residence would find me dealing with two kitchens and probably getting rid of one.<\/p>\n

\"a
The two-story original farmhouse (center) with two additions, one on each end.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As you can see from the picture above, it looks pretty good from the outside, condition-wise. The current owner had stopped living there and I was told some pipes had burst during the winter, but it wasn’t so bad, at least from what I could see inside the farmhouse. This is part of my problem with assessing a property like this – there’s so much about home structures and systems (like an oil heat system with radiators and water coming from a well) that I know nothing about and would need to learn if I were to take on this property.<\/p>\n

There’s plenty more to this story – stay tuned!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’ve been following my real estate adventures (follies?), you may recall that I had an extended dalliance with the idea of buying a farmhouse with a barn in Upstate New York last summer. I fell in love with the idea, but researched it and estimated costs of repairs and was overwhelmed with the idea … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3546,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,830],"tags":[131,831,312,626],"class_list":["post-3541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home-living","category-real-estate","tag-barn","tag-farm","tag-frenchtown-nj","tag-real-estate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3541"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3549,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3541\/revisions\/3549"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}