When I was a kid my parents bought a barn. Actually, they bought a farm, complete with 180 acres of land, a saggy Edwardian-era farmhouse, multiple very saggy outbuildings, and two staunch barns that had been built together (one in the early-mid 1800s, the other about 60 years later). My parents didn’t care about the outbuildings: they–my father, mostly, but my mother as well–wanted a place they could turn into a kind of funky,...