The Barn Bug

By: Cynthia Gunn

It’s a hard soul who can resist the charms of a barn. Especially those of us who grew up in the city and foster romantic notions of the pastoral countryside.

These notions had a firm grip on Linda Vanderlee when she was bitten by the barn bug back in 1993 and ended up the owner of an old barn and house in Rupert. She had a dream. The barn’s days of housing horses were a thing of the past so she would renovate it to become…Rendezvous Rupert (www.rendezvousrupert.org).

Today, together with help from Diane Morey, they run a non-profit business from the converted barn, offering workshops for mainly city-folk on everything from belly dancing to visioning workshops to teambuilding. “I always loved barns,” Linda says, and “saw it as a retreat centre almost from the beginning.”

The old books of McLennan Insurance provide evidence that the barn existed at least as far back as 1898. When Linda bought it there were still stalls on one side. On the other, however, there was a mountain of old stuff, including an old piano unfortunately rotting away. Julie Spallin’s grandmother lived here in the house out front at one time—perhaps she played rousing tunes on a Saturday night? Upstairs was a veritable treasure chest of old windows and doors that had been accumulating there for some time.

Using only local tradespeople and labour, the renovations began in earnest in the summer of 1996.
Rob Warnock was key to repairing the structural aspects of the barn. A supporting beam had broken, and cement pads for new posts had to be made. The ceiling was very low, so they also dug down a bit to try and gain some height. 

The lack of knowledge about the whole conversion process has been the biggest challenge: who to go to? what is possible? Finding local talent has been difficult, Linda concedes. They are very busy—it’s well nigh impossible to get an engineer to call back. And sometimes it’s difficult to discern if a tradesperson is really knowledgeable about old buildings. In the end, though, talking with neighbouring farmers and working together with local tradespeople made it all possible.

When inside you can’t really tell that you’re in a barn, except for the huge old door at one end separating the two parts of the original barn. That leads Linda to the next step of the dream: converting the upstairs and utilising the wonderful heights and beams that exist up there.

Published in the Low Down newspaper - March 31, 2004