Wedding Wine Selection

Since it was a "Barn Wedding", all the wines we served were home made and most of them were country wines, including:

• Dry Cherry
• Sour Cherry (slightly sweet)
• Honey Crisp Apple
• Dry Apple
• Peach
• Elderberry
• Concord

All the beer was homemade as well, not by us, but by the bride and groom.  The bar menu was written on a mirrored antique serving tray.

Barn Wedding Weekend Preview

We spent all week getting ready for the wedding - planting flowers, mulching, weeding, mowing, cleaning, decorating and setting up.  It is finally all coming together for our barn wedding:

Set-up for the wedding ceremony below the pond

Dinner setting inside the barn

Wedding Flowers

flats of flowers waiting to be planted

begonias in pots by the front rose bed

hanging baskets on fence rails

wedding favors:  lavender plants in small pots with name tags

geraniums planted between tulips (which had bloomed too early)

Barn Transformation Complete!

We finished the downstairs barn renovation project:

• Pointed all the stone walls (3 walls)
• Dug out the old dirt floor, ran drainage pipes and cemented it
• Tore out the old horse stalls, cow stanchions and feed troughs
• Installed new windows
• Installed new entrance door
• Build window frames using oak boards from the old horse stalls
• sanded polyurethaned window frames
• Rebuilt the one wooden wall
• Drywalled and painted the interior of the wooden wall
• Refaced the outside of the barn walls that were not stone
• Closed off sections between old beams toward the outside
• Completed rewired everything
• New outside and inside lighting
• Painted all new sections of the barn "barn red"
• Build a "crush pad"
• Installed railing on crushpad, painted it barn red also

All this in less than a year - and just in time for the wedding!

What Color to Choose

Finally finished "mudding" and sanding all the drywall - quite a challenge with all the crooked old beams and rough edges.  Even found time to "prime" the drywall during the week.  We finally had to make a decision for the color of the walls - our choices, we decided, were limited by the colors found in the various stones of the barn walls.  Upon closer examination of the stones, there were a myriad of colors.  Jeff's preference was for a "real color", not another version of beige or brown, which narrowed our choices somewhat.  We ended up narrowing our search to a rosy sort of brick color or a darkish purple.  We got chips from both rocks, took those to Lowes and tried matching them to paint strips - then bought 4 sample colors.  The dark purple shade, called "Smoked Mulberry"  was the one!

Barnwedding Countdown - Less than 2 weeks

We made lots of progress this weekend with finishing the barn in time for the wedding : 

• Painted the railing on the crush pad
• Painted siding on the front and side of the barn
• 3rd coat of drywall put on and sanded inside
• Window frames built from old boards we took off the horse stalls
• Cut and painted boards for wedding signs

Landscaping for Barnwedding Started



back fence row with mulch

Lars weed whipping around grape vines

With less than 2 weeks to go, we are making weeding, mowing and planting a priority at this point.  Did not want to start too soon, so that new weeds would not have time to surface through the mulch - plus it was still too cold to plant flowers.  But this weekend we started in the back part, where guests will park and walk to the pond for the ceremony.  Thick layers of mulch were spread around the last remaining tulips (unfortunately they all bloomed too early because of the warm spell we had early in April).   Supplemented the plantings with hostas and will add petunias in the sunny spots and impatients in the shady spots.  Sam also mowed the pond side of the farm in one afternoon!