Old Barns and new IBC regulations

I am working with some folks that have dismantled an old barn in Indiana and have moved it to South Carolina to be re-erected. These guys are all excellent framers and their workmanship is beyond reproach. The problem lies with our Building Codes department, who wants to see inspection and grade stamps on every piece of structural timber. Our jurisdication recently adopted the 2000 IBC and I was told there is absolutely no leeway in approving non-inspected timbers.

Has anyone out there had this same experience and/or advise in order to address this issue? The barn will be converted into living space and an occupancy certificate will be needed. We are getting an inspector to grade/approve the new timbers, but the 150 yr old structure will cause trouble. Has anyone had luck "grandfathering" an old barn in light of new IBC regulations?

Thanks for your time.

Tom Stults

Tom,

Haven't had the kind of problems you refer to. Sounds like we may in the future. Kurt has suggested looking into "historic building codes" in a newer topic in this forum. Might be worth looking into.

Tom- I've only converted two barns to homes, but in both cases- different municipalities- we were required to show structural engineering calculations for the homes to get permitted. No engineer would sign off on the old timber-despite it being obviously sound and likely of better material than what is available to most of us today.

We were able to circumvent the issue by enclosing the frames with SIP's- actually designing the SIP's to do almost all of the structural work. We used structural connections rather than the usual curtain wall connections most SIP over timber applications use- and we added a ridge beam to carry the roof panels, which ran ridge to eve. Likely overkill structurally, but that's not such a bad thing I guess. Worked well and passified the inspector.