Part of our job is to find barns that have fallen down, are about to fall down, and are not rotten. We drove by a barn near the Tennessee state line several times going to and from Fayetteville where we were doing some work. Every time I drove past it, I'd say something about how much I wanted this barn that was damaged. We were coming back from Fayetteville one day and my wife/secretary listened to me wish then told me to turn around and see if we could locate the owner.

So I decided to try it. The first residence from the barn turned out no luck, we asked the nearest business with no luck, then we stopped at a house that turned out to be empty, then we stopped at one where there was a tractor. I couldn't get anyone to the door so we left a note. On our next trip we stopped again at the house with the tractor. After knocking longer than I wanted to, a man came to the door and looked suspiciously at me and wasn't very friendly. He said they had people asking about the barn all the time and looked like our conversation was over.

I quickly pulled out my phone and started showing him photos of stuff I had built. He stopped me and said he needed to get his wife. She came out, looked at some of my pictures, and said this was just what she wanted. They told us that we could have some of the wood, we saw them each time we came to get a load of wood and began to know them and the next thing we knew, they said for me to get all of it that I wanted and in exchange I built them several pieces. She had been hoping to find someone who would build her some keepsakes with some of the wood because her grandfather and then her father had owned the farm. We wound up being friends with them and it all came out good.