Some of our barn's history revealed

This is exciting news: we just received in the mail a set of complete architectural drawings of the frame of our barn. Some background-

Prior to the dismantling of the barn we hired someone to take detailed measurements of the frame so that a set of tags marking every single member of the frame could be produced and placed on the frame. These tags would make it possible to reassemble the frame later on. Without the tags reassembly would have been a nightmare! (Talk about a difficult jigsaw puzzle!) If you scroll down to the post titled "We made the news!" you can see the tags in place while the frame comes down. The other purpose for having the measurements taken was to enable a set of architectural drawings to be made of the frame. These drawings will next go to our architects and will used by them to create the construction plans for our barn house.

Upon receiving the plans and pouring over them for a while it became clear that there were some interesting historical layers to our barn's past. This was initially hinted at when Dad and I visited the barn prior to purchase. We noticed two interesting things: first, some of the timbers in the frame appeared to have been "recycled" from older structures. These timbers bore the tell-tale signs of past use, most notably the empty mortise holes which had once held the tenons of beams now missing.