Announcement    Dear Customers (or potential customers),

I was just contacted by one of my clients who asked about our having been hit by the Derecho Storm that blew through the Midwest on Monday, August 10th. And, Yes, we were in the direct path of the storm. It was like a combination of a 20 - 30 mile wide tornado, and a hurricane! We had sustained winds of over 120 miles per hour, with gusts that were higher than that (as measured by our local weather station).

As you can probably imagine, there was tremendous damage and even areas that were completely devastated. So many of our historic old wooden barns (most often made of whatever hard wood that was growing on the land that the new settler was planning to farm) were strewn out across the neighboring fields in mostly small chunks. The newer metal barns and buildings didn't fare any better, with metal siding twisted and torn and blown up to 5 miles across the landscape before it caught in a tree or low-lying area where it could very well still be many years from now.

My partner asked me, "who is responsible for the debris?, is it the land owner or the building owner that has to do the clean up?" And I had to admit, that I honestly didn't know. Often times the debris is piled in the field of the barn owner, but with so many small farms being sold off to farming corporations, it's not as likely to be that way anymore. But when it comes to the smaller farmers like my family has been for nearly two centuries, no one bothers to figure out who is legally responsible... everyone just gets together and helps out in whatever way they can to try to clean up the parts and pieces of a family's history that is now in the way of an upcoming harvest and threatening to damage or even destroy the seriously expensive equipment that we use to bring those crops in.

So, yes, there will be buildings that still have to be taken down after all of the urgent work is done. And, yes, I hope to be able to help out by deconstructing and repurposing as many of these buildings as I am able. But for now, I will be concentrating on catching up with my current clients who had to wait with me while the power lines (were which were tangled and twisted and very-often broken and laying across the road) were cleaned up, repaired or replaced, and finally turned back on. I personally was without electricity for just under two weeks... nothing in comparison to some of the hurricane survivors of recent years. Or compared to a dairy farmer who milks 180 head of cows with only two people through the automated systems that have come along... who now has to milk all 180 head by hand - TWICE A DAY!, just to maintain the prospect of having the ability to make a living for his/her family when the power does return. Unfortunately, that hard-won milk is often dumped on the fields too, because even with a generator, there isn't always a way to keep that volume of milk cold and maintained within FDA standards.

Also, if you have a special occasion, or just a special project, Frames In Barnwood would be thrilled to be a part of it by customizing a frame or just about any other interior decoration item! Just hit "contact owner" or "ask a question on any of our shop pages, and we will get back to you as soon as heavenly possible!

I consider myself extremely fortunate to have ridden the storm out in one of those historic barns that did make it!, and to have weathered this once in a lifetime (I hope) storm with no injuries or loss of life to any of the people close to me. But I know that not everyone was as fortunate as I was! And so, even though this huge catastrophe isn't getting the national air play of even a minor hurricane, PLEASE take a moment out of your busy day and "say a prayer for"... / "send some loving - healing energy to"... the whole of the Midwest that will be picking up from this storm for a very long time.

Now, on a lighter note:
As I mentioned above, these 100+ year old barns were most often built with the massive hardwood trees that stood on the property that the new coming farmers/ranchers wanted to settle. And some of the trees that produce this wood are now extinct!, but even the ones made of oak and maple and even walnut are a dwindling resource. Because barns are no longer made of huge boards of hardwood lumber! They aren't even made of large pinewood lumber. Barns these days are nearly all made of metal of one sort or another. And so the kind of wood that I use in my frames and other interior designs will never have the opportunity to sit outside and stop the prairie winds for a century or two while the sun bakes a beautiful patina into it's surface. In other words, there is a finite supply of Barn Wood... and I feel so very blessed to be able to be among the few crafts people that have a chance to work with the raw beauty of this wood in order to bring it into your home and hopefully inspire a kind of reverence for the history of the wood itself, where it has come from and what it has had to endure in order to have developed the outstanding patina you will be receiving from Frames In Barnwood if you should happen to purchase one of our frames or other projects.

I look forward to having the chance to impress you!
--
DeAnn