We have acquired an old Pennsylvania Dutch farm property in south central Pennsylvania that we will build a new house on. However, there is an existing barn and log home that we were told were from around 1840. The house gives me the creeps for some reason, but the barn is of interest. It is timber frame, and the inside roof rafters are logs. The barn has a bunch of later extensions that I'm not certain the age of, except some have cinder blocks at the base rather than the stone foundation of the original barn. To my totally untrained eye, the roof and inside frame look good, but some of the foundation beams of the extensions are either sagging or have cracked. The best preserved part however looks to be the original barn.

My partner would like to pull all of it down, and maybe it should be pulled down. There is nothing appealing about it from the outside; just white weatherbeaten planks. But when I went inside that barn and saw the framing I tell you what. It was what made me purchase that property as much as anything else about it (and it is a very beautiful 30+ acres). It made me buy and read all the PA barn books and skulk around unregistered on this forum for a good while to see what I could learn until surfacing now.

My question to this forum is what should be my approach to saving, or at least assessing this barn without making ignorant mistakes? I do have a company coming out to have a look at it, and like I told the guy, I would rather say I own a Pennsylvania bank barn than that I had one demolished. Thanks for any advice you could give me.