From time to time on Twitter, I’ve posted photos from inside the PFT barn. From time to time on Twitter, folks have asked for a tour of the barn.
Last night, I decided to give everyone a look inside. Here’s a 91-second video of the place where I spend plenty of time, watching football or movies or listening to music and otherwise working, on PFT or Playmakers or On Our Way Home or other projects still to come.
The barn has been on the property for years. From 1995 through 2003, we lived in the nearby neighborhood. That barn was part of our view. Nine years ago, we bought the house and the land and the barn.
The barn was in not-great shape. There were holes in the roof. Bees and wasp nests inside. Bird and other beasts. (Ground hogs still live under the barn. I haven’t had to resort to extreme varmint-eradication measures, yet.)
It was used for storage, mainly. I rarely went down there.
In 2015, my nephew had an idea. Half of the barn contained horse stalls with a dirt floor. He wanted to remove the stalls, put gravel on the ground, and install an old pool table and a space heater. It would be a place to hang out and have a cigar when it was too cold to sit outside.
Along the way, we had some trees that needed to come down. The company that removed the trees had a portable mill. Next thing you know, we had fresh-cut wood for placement on the floor, and elsewhere.
In working on the room [Editor’s note: I did none of the actual work], we realized that plenty of the interior components needed to be replaced, since the weather had rotted some of the wood. We (not me) added a tin roof. A ridiculously heavy wood-burning stove. TVs. Furniture. A poker table. A coffee table. The pool table. A shuffle bowling alley. Booze on a bar fashioned from wood from the trees that had been cut down. A large piece of polished wood that serves as my desk. A hand-made humidor. Neon beer sign. Various forms of sports and other memorabilia, like a Marsh Wheeling Stogies wall clock from the ’50s. Football helmets. Guitars that I can’t play very well, but that look good on the wall. A vintage guitar that I got brand new back in the ’70s and could never play very well, but that looks good hanging from my desk area.
More recently, we’ve added leather recliners in the main room, and arcade games in the pool room. I can’t stop buying the arcade games. They’re not nearly as expensive as they used to be, and there’s room for two or threemore.
So that’s the place, if you ever wondered. Or if you didn’t. Maybe someday we’ll have a special event there, like a visit to the Chocolate Factory. Or not.
Probably not.