From document to guide

The route, step by step

1. Start from a public record. The research file lists 14 documents: National Park Service material (its preservation brief, the National Register, the Heritage Documentation Programs and the Standards for Rehabilitation), state historic preservation office field guides and Register studies from Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Maryland and Minnesota, the State Library of North Carolina, the Forest Service's Wood Handbook and Penn State Extension. Blogs, sales pages, contractors, makers and forums are never the basis for a statement.
2. Take facts only from the documents a page names. Each guide's sources box lists what it relies on, and a factual statement should trace back to one of them. The explanations that connect those facts are the site's own phrasing, so the guides contain sentences no document says in those words.
3. Prove every year. Dates are what memory gets wrong, so the test suite holds a list of years confirmed in each source. Any year in a guide that is not on the list for that guide's own sources fails the run.
4. Quote measurements as given. Timber sizes, moisture levels and similar figures appear exactly as the source states them. Where the documents are silent, as they are on building costs, prices and how many barns of a type survive, the guide leaves the gap open instead of filling it.
5. Label the myths. Items marked "often said" report a popular claim; the answer printed beside each one comes from the cited documents.
6. Run the source script. On 2026-10-26 npm run sources fetched the 14 documents in a single pass and searched them for 134 fact patterns. Four are PDFs, and for those the script searched text extracted from the file. All 14 responded and all 134 patterns were found. The review date printed on every guide is the date of that pass.

What nobody has checked

The script shows the facts were in the documents. It does not show the guides tell them well. Nobody has read a guide side by side with its sources, and the guides have had no independent human editorial review: no editor, historian or preservation professional has been through them. An AI system drafted all of the text and drew the line illustrations in SVG code. More on that is on the about page.

Practical limits

No guide gives instructions for structural, electrical or fire-safety work, and worked examples are flagged "Example" and are about no real farm, barn or person. Readers with a particular barn are pointed to a structural engineer or their State Historic Preservation Office.

Ties

No agency, preservation office, university, restaurant or other company has approved, reviewed or sponsored the site. Public documents are cited because anyone can check them, not because their publishers back Barnbuster. No products or contractors are named and nothing is for sale. In this first version documents are cited by title without links; any future links would be chosen for readers, and paid ones would say so.

Stale facts and fixes

The script ran over the fourteen documents one time, on 2026-10-26, and it is not set to run again. A preservation office or the Park Service may have reissued a brief or a field guide since then, and the guides here would not reflect it. The document as its publisher now offers it is the one to trust: look it up before you rely on a date or a method, and where it and a guide disagree, go with the publisher.

Readers cannot write in, so a wrong year or a misread study could sit in a guide with nobody aware of it. Any fix made to a guide will carry its date on that guide.