Oskaloosa Herald 9/12/05
Area Man Restores Barn
By SUE SALISBURY
The Oskaloosa Herald
OSKALOOSA — This is a story about a man who restores old barns for a living. But it’s impossible to talk about the work that Bruce Willemsen and his company Barn Builders do without talking a little about the man himself.
"When I was three, I sat in the kitchen sink and watched our barn burn down." Willemsen revealed this bit of information late in the interview, and at the time, he wasn’t even talking about restoring barns. Nonetheless, it seemed to make all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place – most of all Willemsen’s all-consuming passion for barns, but also his love of rural life, his need to be both physically and mentally active, the satisfaction he finds in restoring something useful.
When Willemsen was 16, his father gave up farming. Willemsen needed work. So as soon as school was out he headed into Des Moines and began framing houses. It was work to which the big, burly kid with a penchant for hard work was well suited. After high school, he started building houses back home in the area of his native Pella. But it didn’t really satisfy him.
"I helped build those," he said with a thrust of his chin toward a row of vinyl-sided, cookie-cutter duplexes. The tone of his voice clearly suggested he did not consider this to be the apex of his work.
And there were the hassles. Subcontractors who didn’t show up on time. Wrong parts being delivered. And "people would have this date in their head when they were going to move it, and sometimes it just didn’t work out that way."
In his twenties he took a big step away from the construction business and was hired by an insurance company as a customer service representative in rural western Iowa, "because," he laughed, "I could read a plat book." On Monday, he’d be handed a week’s worth of assignments. However, Willemsen is, to say the least, more goal-oriented than some. He’d often finish his work in a couple of days and have the rest of his time to, shall we say, follow his own interests.
"But that’s not fair to the other men," his supervisor objected, upon learning Willemsen’s work habits. Today, his only response to that line of reasoning is a cocked eyebrow and a sardonic look.
One day early in his insurance career, his supervisor approached him, saying, "We need to get an application from you," since he’d been hired solely on his ability to read a plat book. Part of the application process was an aptitude test. His supervisor came back a few days and told Willemsen, "I’m supposed to fire you." Considering his work ethic, Willemsen was a little surprised by this news. But it seems that this self-same, aggressive work ethic had rather alarmed the "suits" in the Home Office, who had branded him "unmanageable." The job was, however, his for as long as he wanted it.
Which turned out not to be all that long. To a guy whose home was not just anywhere he hung his hat, life on the road had lost its charm. He longed to be back on the farm.
About then, out of the blue, he got a call from a buddy from his construction days, informing him there was a big project starting.
"That was it. The next day I was out of there," Willemsen said, referring to his insurance job. "You know," he continued with a big grin, "I’ve worked all my life and I’ve never once applied for a job."
But housing construction had not become any more gratifying than he’d found it previously. What he wanted to do was work on barns.
"I’d worked on barns all my life and I really enjoyed it. I just never though there’d be a way I could do that."
Finally, one day in 1998, he decided to try to make that dream a reality. That’s when Barn Builders came into being. And with Willemsen’s tenacity, you can bet this business was a done deal. From 1998 until 2003 they transitioned from houses to barns.
"My wife is supportive but she thinks I’m nuts," Willemsen joked. "Actually she doesn’t care what I do as long as I’m not underfoot."
"That first barn, we didn’t know what we were doing." But with the same doggedness Willemsen has displayed all his life, he stuck it out and the project was completed. And that first barn was a doozy. Barn Builders was hired by Davis and Eunice Solkerts of Pella to rehab their barn. This was not simply a matter of straightening a foundation and making some new doors. When they were finished, the third level was devoted to Solkerts’ extensive model train collection, complete with landscaping and muraled walls. At round level two, reproduction carriage doors allowed for two-car parking and the walk-out basement housed a casual apartment.
Willemsen has managed to assemble a sort of "dream team" – Lloyd Uitermarkt, Jason Schippers and Don Putz.
"I can’t say enough great things about these guys. If I say we’re going to work on a silo, they get the ladder out and get right up there. If we’ve got to clear brush they’ve got the saws out and are all over it. They can do electrical, roofing, framing, lay rock for foundations." Willemsen says. "We can communicate without speaking." Grandpa Gerald Van Zante is usually on site, too, making doors and often chewing them out about something.
"It’s a little embarrassing when he scolds me in front of a customs," Williemsen confessed, his ruddy complexion turning a little redder. But it’s also a great sales technique – it’s a family that works together.
As long as there’s a roof on the barn and it’s been kept dry, it’s usually salvageable.
"People want to restore their barns for a bunch of different reasons," Willemsen observed. "Families who managed to hold on to their farms through the Depression and the ’80s are really proud of that fact. You can always tell those farms ’cause the grounds are kept so meticulously. They’ll restore the barn because they’re proud of it and want the place to look nice. Some folks buy a building site and just decide to fix up the barn. Other people plan to use it, either for horses or maybe for entertaining. We’ve gotten a lot of business along Highway 30, up by Marshalltown and State Center. We’d do one barn and word would spread."
Willemsen took me to look at a barn outside of Oskaloosa currently owned by Ruth Bass, now of Brigham City, Utah, and her sisters. The farm was originally bought by their grandfather, John McKinney, in 1881. The barn was built around 1895, according to Rex Wright, the current manager. Ruth’s father Ray inherited the farm and, with his passing, it went to Ruth and her sisters. She noted with pride that the family received a Century Farm certificate last year at the state fair. Ruth is giving some thought to returning to the farmstead and building a home there.
The barn has a number of unique features.
"When we first came out here, we couldn’t even see it, the trees had grown up so much around it,"he said. And it was surrounded by an assortment of other buildings slowly sinking back into the earth. After cutting and bulldozing they found what is termed a "bank" barn; that is, part of barn is built into the bank of the hill. There was solid reasoning behind this design. On the open side of the barn, the lowest floor is at ground level – on the side built into the bank, the second floor is at ground level. Therefore two floors of the barn can be accessed easily.
Normally the first thing Barn Builders does is to pull all the old wiring and put in new. There are two reasons for this. One, they need light to work by and an adequate power source for their tools. Secondly, they don’t want antiquated wiring catching fire. This particular barn was unique, however, Willemsen noted, in that it had never been wired. Still, enough doors, windows and siding were missing that there was sufficient light to see.
The lower level had housed horses, perhaps 18 to 20, Willemsen guessed. The stalls on one side were larger and were reserved for the draft horses, with a pole vertically down the middle of each to keep Buck and Bessie from getting into each other’s territory. On the other side, stalls were smaller and would have been used for lighter horses or children’s ponies and also for buggies. A "kick" wall on the inside faced the lower part of the outside walls, so when horses kicked back, they weren’t damaging a structuraly wall. An opening in the ceiling allowed for hay to be pitched down from the mow above to the feed troughs. The remains of a brick floor indicated that these horses had had fairly deluxe quarters.
Another unusual feature of this barn, Willemsen pointed out, was that on the second floor, a corn crib and a grainery-within-a-grainery had been built into a corner. The rest of that level would have been a work area. This area was the "home base," Willemsen said, "the center of all the farm activity." Willemsen pointed out a repair where a couple of boards had been knocked out, facing the road, so that people who were partying there illegally could keep an eye on who was coming. The barn has now been secured against intruders.
A ladder ascended one side of the open shaft from the hay mow above to the troughs below. A third peculiar feature of this barn was the hay mow door. Normally, these doors hinged across the bottom and would simply drop down to open. This one, however, was hinged down the middle and pulled back and in to open.
“They called us just in time," Willemsen said. Many boards in the west wall were missing or beyond saving and many of the closures were missing.
Perhaps most precarious, however, was a relatively small element of the barn. The limestone rock forming the roughly foot-high foundation of the side not built into the bank had begun buckling and an approximately 10-inch diameter stump remained of a tree that had been growing out of it.
Willemsen and company have stabilized the foundation. However, should the owner decided to have further work done on the barn, as is often the case, it will require further repair. The hay mow door had to be rebuilt and the track along the leak of the roof that hauled hay back into the barn reworked. The barn had been built with mortise and tenon joints, which means a square peg is carved at the end of a beam and fits into a square hole in the beam to which it is attached. This joint is secured with wooden pegs. A number of these joints had to be repaired. They also applied a new coat of — what else — barn red paint.
Another unusual feature in this particular barn, Willemsen said, is the tongue and groove siding, which is a variation from the board-and-batten siding usually seen in barns.
While it would seem that repair on a structure the size of a barn would call for some big, heavy-duty machinery, Willemsen said this is not the case. Barns are usually surrounded by other farm buildings. It’s very difficult to maneuver large equipment in close enough. Their basic tools include ladders, a skid loader, scaffolding and a lot of hand tools.
"It usually takes two to three years to complete a job, " said Willemsen and as far as he knows, they’re the only people around here doing what they do.
In talking about his chose line of work, Willemsen borrowed a line from a shade-tree mechanic friend with and adventurous streak, "See this? Don’t do this!"
But he loves his work, so much so, in fact, that he keeps a journal of everything he and his family do each day. In the front of the journal is a list of goals. "This is how I keep myself focused. I wake up every day excited about what I’m going to do that day," he said.
There are worse ways to live.
