The Dummies Guide to Amish Barns

Post and beam barn

One of our staffers grew up in an Amish community in northern Indiana, and is pretty well acquainted with "The Plain People." Chances are pretty good that he's seen – and been in – hella more Amish barns than the total dumbass who put fingertips to keyboard and barfed up the post, "How to Build an Amish Barn." For the record, that clueless freelancer is one Rebecca Boardman and her post (originally at eHow.com) is now at the website Classroom.com. Nonetheless, it's still stupid.

We've seen Boardman here before, leveraging her claimed expertise with horses to explain how to build a horse barn and a split-rail fence. In neither case would following her instructions result in success because, to be blunt, she wouldn't know a hammer from a horse's ass. Here's some of her "information," which she apparently harvested from a series of photographs of a barn raising...

• "Create a foundation... Measure off the area of your barn and stake the four corners. Run a guide-string from corner to corner, and place your concrete barrier 2-by-4s down to help you shape and guide the cement."  – Yup, her "barriers" (we guess that's what she calls the forms) are 2-by-4s, apparently lying on the ground...
• "Set your corner posts on the day of the raising.... Depending on the height and size of your barn, you may or may not need a joist to lift the foundation beams into place." – We can't even parse that bullshit, but maybe she's talking about a ridgepole? Or perhaps she meant "hoist"?
• "Foundation beams will be moved by hand and notched and hammered into place. The roof beams will need a joist to lift them into place in order to secure them." – Does Becky even know what a joist is? and WTF are these "foundation beams," anyway?
• "Your frame should be a rough outline of your completed barn. It will serve as the skeleton for the rest of your lumber. The frame is created by fitting the lumber to the foundation and roof beams..." – Wait: is she perhaps trying to describe pole barn construction? Post-and-beam?
• "Fill in the open spots with your 2-by-4s or 1-by-2 slat lumber. These are your walls..." – We won't even try to explain that bullshit.
• "Roof your barn with 2-by-4s and then cover it with shingles." – We dunno, maybe you need some sort of rafters? And who uses 2-by-4 decks, anyway?
• "Hang your barn door... Use a level to hang the doors straight, so they will hang plumb and swing freely." – It's our considered opinion that you should have been using a level a loooooooong time before this step...

So there you have it: how NOT to build an Amish barn. Besides the fact that "Amish" is a barn style and not the process she tried to describe (hand tools, bunches of helpers), Boardman's grasp of even the most basic techniques and processes in construction left our staffers curious about whether a barn like Boardman's would even survive its first weather event... or maybe any barn our Dumbass of the Day build would just collapse of its own weight. Which probably explains why this is her third award...

DDIY - CONSTRUCTION