Lacey Harwood’s barn structure that totals to about 985 square feet of living space took less than a year to complete, and cost under $130,000. Courtesy of Lacey Harwood
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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Lacey Harwood, a 39-year-old “barndominium” owner based one hour outside of Houston. It has been edited for length and clarity.
In 2010, my husband and I built our 4,500-square-foot barndominium, and I’ve been hooked since then.
I was on the fence at first because I didn’t want to live in a barn, but he told me we could build our home for cheaper and spend more money on furnishing it however I liked. Once we moved in, I fell in love.
They’re low-maintenance, and our electricity bill was never over $300 in a 4,500-square-foot main residence and a 1,800-square-foot workshop in the middle of a Texas summer. During the winter storm of 2021, we lost power for about four days, but the inside temperature of our house never went below 65 degrees.
We thought we’d stay in that home forever, but we decided it was time to build a home where we could focus more on farming the land rather than maintaining a huge house.
So, in 2022, we sold our massive barndominium and got to work building a smaller home situated on about eight acres of land.
Her videos about living in a barndominium have gone viral multiple time on TikTok, and Harwood has gained over 300,000 followers since starting her account. Courtesy of Lacey Harwood
For the past four years, I’ve run a small business creating home decor and gifts and teaching classes to show others in my area how to make their own decor out of wood. When it came time to build our new barndominium in 2022, I took the lead on the process since I was the one at home.
The beauty of barndominiums is that they don’t take as long to build as traditional homes. The main home, which includes a kitchen, living room, one bedroom, one bathroom, and a walk-in closet, was started in November 2022 and completed in January.
If I had to give an estimate, I’d say the full barn cost us under $130,000 to build.
We lived in an RV on the land while we worked on the 235-square-foot guest house. After about two months, we moved into the completed bungalow — as we like to call it — while we finished working on the main 750-square-foot residence.
My dad built homes for a living, so I have a background in professional home-building based on what I learned from him growing up. I finished a lot of the inside projects myself.
I did all the plumbing, some of the electrical work, and all of the design in addition to running the build myself. I haven’t tallied it all up, but I’d say we saved around $75,000 doing projects ourselves instead of hiring contract workers.
Harwood and her husband lived in this 235-square-foot tiny guest house until they completed the main residence. Courtesy of Lacey Harwood
The structure is insulated and the exterior is super low-maintenance. In our 12 years living in our first barndominium, two power washes were the only outdoor upkeep that had to be done.
However, there is one big drawback of living in a barndominium.
There’s virtually no internet service indoors unless your phone or device is hooked up to a hotspot. If for some reason our hotspot isn’t working, we have to make phone calls outside, and our TVs won’t work.
The 750-square-foot main residence boasts a spacious bathroom and a walk-in closet with built-in storage. Courtesy of Lacey Harwood
I started sharing my first barndominium on TikTok because I wanted somewhere to keep all the memories of our home and share all of the hard work that went into designing it. I was really proud of what we built.
Now, our new barndominium has gone viral, and people want us to document the whole process. I don’t mind cause it helps me remember what I’ve done here over the past year.
I recommend that anyone who’s interested in building a barndominium finds a contractor that has experience building these structures. It’s a very different process than building a traditional home, and small mistakes can end up becoming costly later on.
