Building a new life with old materials

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, April 19th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Paul Butler.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: an unexpected career change.

Years ago, Michael Bailey owned his own ad company—and hadn’t ever built anything with his hands.

But that didn’t stop him from deciding one day to leave it all and start building homes.

WORLD Associate Correspondent Travis Kircher has the story.

TRAVIS KIRCHER, REPORTER: Michael Bailey is sometimes mistaken for a vagrant. His long gray hair, Army green toboggan hat, and scraggly beard give off a certain look. But Michael Bailey is anything but homeless.

MICHAEL BAILEY: This is actually our second barn house.

He lives in a converted 9,000 square foot barn that he and his family built themselves...

BAILEY: Come on in! (Door opens)
KIRCHER: Oh, that is neat.

…out of repurposed historic materials.

BAILEY: So the barn is from 1890. All of the logs you see between the barn bents and the framing is actually from an 1880s warehouse in Louisville.

Bailey paid for some of the materials, but got most of it for free. He says landowners just wanted it off their hands.

As he moves through the house, it’s clear Bailey and his family included some unique features. Like the waterfall and the pond. In the living room.

BAILEY: Who puts a pond in their living room? (LAUGHS) I just thought it would be a good idea. But we probably would not have done it if we’d hired a professional, who would have given us five reasons to Sunday why it wouldn’t have worked.

By now you’re thinking Bailey was born with a socket wrench in one hand and a power saw in the other, but you couldn’t be further from the truth.

Thirty years ago, Michael Bailey was a very different man.

Back then, in his 30s, he was clean shaven, the owner of his own advertising company, and had never built anything in his life.

BAILEY: Back when I was in advertising, if my step broke on my deck, I’d hire it done. Which is hilariously funny! You know, I’d never built anything.

All of that changed when he and his wife Lori decided to move their family from the suburbs to the country. Bailey decided he was going to build their home himself while his family camped out.

BAILEY: I just got tired, you know, of being dumb! Not knowing how to build. Not teaching my sons how to work with their hands.

But he soon realized he was way over his head – and winter was on the way. That’s when he went to the Lord for guidance.

BAILEY: We went to the Lord in prayer, with a kind of childhood heart prayer with my sons and daughters. Every day, we basically said, you know, ‘We need help!’

Bailey also sought help from friends in the trades – carpenters, masonry workers and construction workers.

BAILEY: I basically said to them, ‘I want you to come here. I want you to show me. Watch me. But I don’t want you to do the work.’ Now some of them listened better than others.

He absorbed it all like a sponge, and soon, his whole family was in on the project.

BAILEY: Every kid helped. My children have beat the concrete off bricks with brick-hammers by the thousands. I mean thousands of bricks.

They finished their first barnhouse in 1995, but they only had four years to live in it. In 1999, they lost that home in a fire.

BAILEY: So we rush home, and the house is literally just ashes. Every single bolt, every floor, everything we had done was ashes. But what a good object lesson that is, showing that things are temporal.

Now the family faced a tough decision: What next?

BAILEY: We had a family meeting and said, ‘Who wants to build another barnhouse?’ (LAUGHS) And it was unanimous. We didn’t have one kid saying, ‘I don’t want to do that again!’

At nine-thousand square feet, their second home may sound enormous, but not when Bailey’s 10 children and 21 grandchildren come for a visit. It also gives Bailey a chance to practice what he calls ‘the lost art of hospitality.’

BAILEY: You know, hospitality is not inviting your friends over. Hospitality is showing kindness to strangers. Is your house built so that you are sheltering people, having them over, engaging them in important discussions about the Savior, and about truth?

As the Baileys’ barnhouse grew, so did Michael’s reputation as a builder. He started getting calls. That’s when he decided to quit his white-collar job and open up Bailey Construction.

BAILEY: I just loved working with my sons every day and I said, ‘To heck with advertising. I’m gonna change gears and work with my sons every day.'

After more than 20 years, Bailey and his sons have restored 80 Civil War-era buildings.

One of those sons is 22-year-old Jarin—the baby of the family. He’s the last remaining son to work with the company.

JARIN: That’s been my favorite part about working with reclaimed lumber, is you can take something that is, sometimes, in a barn stall and then turn it into something beautiful. That’s my favorite part about this home.

And Bailey? Now at 66 years old, he’s going through another career transition…into consulting. He wants to teach young couples how to build homes debt-free, from reclaimed lumber. And he wants to help others restore historic buildings.

His latest job is helping Lakeview Springs—a Christian camp—turn a cabin from the eighteen-hundreds into a Welcome Center.

Making something old into something new again.

BAILEY: They have every interest in this building being here until it’s no longer needed. Which will be when Christ returns.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Travis Kircher, in Corydon and Lanesville, Indiana.

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