Carpenter's farming roots drive desire to reuse lumber from barns

Take a drive through the countryside anywhere in Illinois and you are sure to pass at least one dilapidated old barn no longer in use and perilously close to collapse.

When time comes to reclaim the farmland, many landowners simply torch the once-proud structures. Others have been known to feed what's left of the barn through a wood chipper.

Mel Moehling of Woodstock, however, has a much better idea about what to do with those old barns. He dismantles them, giving the best wood a new start - extending its life by decades, maybe even a century.

Moehling preserves the beams, doors, windows, corn cribs and other wood that is still salvageable. He said it is often necessary to dispose of the siding on the outside of the barn because it disintegrates in your hands during removal. Yet the beams and other wood on the inside of the barn is still perfectly good.

So Moehling reuses the wood, which is often 100 years old or more, to build new houses and barns.

A descendant of Henry W. Moehling, whose farm was once situated in Arlington Heights where Northwest Community Hospital and the Arlington Lakes Golf Course now stand, Moehling has long been tied to the farms and land of northern Illinois. His farmer father moved their large family between seven different farms and ranches here and in Arizona.

"I thought about becoming a farmer, too, but it was not affordable to buy a farm and the necessary equipment," Moehling explained. Still, his ties to nature and the land run deep.

"Whatever the Lord left in the woods, I use," he quipped, referring to the bee hives, animal skins, nests, vines and tree saplings that decorate his own home.

"I am also into planting trees and recycling existing wood," Moehling said. "Our ancestors came here from Europe and cut down these trees to build these barns. So why burn them or chip them up when they are still perfectly good? I actually like working with old wood better than working with new wood."

In addition to being better for the environment, it makes good economical sense, too.

"Some of the beams I get from these barns are 36 feet long. That is an entire tree! You can't buy beams that long today without paying an awful lot of money for them," Moehling said.

A carpenter by trade who recently retired after years as a foreman for the Albin I. Anderson Construction Co. of Arlington Heights, Moehling had a hand in building the company's huge custom homes on the North Shore and in places like Kildeer and Lincolnshire. But he prefers to build log homes and barns these days using recycled wood.

"Building $1.5 million houses is a challenge, but so is building a huge barn with no interior supports," Moehling said. "And I like taking down the old barns that were built using notches and wooden pegs instead of nails, and then working with that seasoned old wood to build something new."

Moehling and his wife, Cheri, live in his first attempt at recycling an old barn. In 1985 he built a fascinating log home using milled logs, wood recycled from barns in Libertyville and Wisconsin, and 30 tons of fieldstone he found on the property while digging the foundation. It is located on a 71/2-acre parcel of wooded land in Woodstock.

In recent years Moehling has dismantled three more barns in Volo and Harvard and he is currently trying to get permission from Crystal Lake to dismantle his own great-grandfather's barn on Randall Road.

"I read recently that in the early 1900s, McHenry County was home to between 5,000 and 6,000 barns," he said. "Today that number is down to between 500 and 600."

Dismantlers like Moehling are generally contacted by municipalities and developers to remove an aging barn. He usually accomplishes it in a few days with the help of his nephews. But no money changes hands. He dismantles the barn and hauls it all away. In exchange, he owns the salvageable wood and may use it however he wishes.

"I consider this a much better option than what happened recently to a 100-foot barn in Hebron," Moehling said. "I went by to check on it one day and they had just torched it. What a waste."

Today Moehling works part-time for Albin I. Anderson and spends the rest of his time planting trees on his 30-acre Christmas tree farm in Woodstock.

The interior of the barn at his tree farm was built using planking from one of the Harvard barns he dismantled, along with windows and doors taken from North Shore houses that were demolished or remodeled.

"They were still good enough for a barn," Moehling explained with a smile.

He also built a large and gorgeous Gambrel-roofed storage barn in Woodstock for Dennis Manarchy, the famous photographer. It is made of reclaimed wood from an old Chicago factory.

"Ninety-eight percent of Dennis' barn was constructed from recycled materials," Moehling said. "It took me a year of working every weekend with the help of five other guys to build it."

While he was finishing up the Manarchy barn, the owners of a nearby horse farm stopped by to watch and asked him to help them finish up a barn they had begun to build themselves using materials recycled from the old Sears Distribution Center, some old factories and a railway station in England. He enthusiastically agreed and now is a regular visitor to their barns and riding arena.

"Using recycled materials can save you money if you are doing the labor yourself," Moehling said, "and it is good for the environment. But (buying) seasoned barn wood can cost more than new wood because it is definitely in demand by restaurants and other places."

If you want a smaller quantity, you can even buy old wood on Internet auction sites.

"I have seen 8-by-8-inch aged barn wood beams selling for $28 per lineal foot on eBay and have seen 1-by-12-inch boards of that same aged wood selling there, too, for $5 per lineal foot. Both are amazing prices when compared to new wood. But people like the rustic, aged look and they are willing to pay for it," Moehling said.

So why is anyone torching an old barn these days?