Hasta La Ideas

The furniture pieces you see here all look quite old, but in fact, they’re brand new. They’re all made by Furniture from the Barn, a Pennsylvania-based outfit that gets their raw material, as their name implies, from no-longer-used barns.

The family-run business works with a local Amish concern that takes down dilapidated 18th-Century barns in the Pennsylvania and Maryland areas. The raw wood is transported back to Furniture From the Barn’s workshop, where it’s dried over a period of months, cleaned, and turned into rustic furniture pieces. And rather than using commercial finishes, FFTB makes their own paint out of organic materials (pigment, limes, and curdled milk, believe it or not).

Pieces are produced by hand, combining the talents of owner Kelly Lee Kelly, her furniture craftsman father “Pop George” and her master carpenter husband, Michael.

Beyond the satisfaction of recycling otherwise doomed wood and not having to cut down new trees, Furniture From the Barn has a raw material that’s of higher quality. “Old-growth pine was harvested in the 1800s, when it was already 150 to 200 years old,” Kelly told The Washington Examiner. “It’s much harder than today’s pine. The boards are wider, and no pesticides or chemical fertilizers were used in those days.”

Here’s a couple of videos providing a brief look at what they do:

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