Edmonton couple rescues historic barn from former farm

Standing in their yard south of Edmonton, Dick Puurveen and Georgina Albert admire the newest addition to their property.

“It’s a structure that has so much historical value,” Puurveen said.

“You cannot make something like that anymore.”

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The 1950s dairy barn came from a former farm just minutes down the road, near Beaumont in Leduc County.

The land there is being developed into industrial property and the developers wanted as little as possible to go to waste.

“With everything else in the property, the goal has been not to put it in the landfill,” land developer Brian Middleton explained.

“Try to recycle, reuse or repurpose everything that was here in terms of all the assets.”

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He said so far it’s going well — they’ve repurposed items like grain bins, lumber and metal.

“These buildings and the history that was here, it just deserved a better fate than going into the landfill,” Middleton said.

Puurveen and Albert admired that effort.

“That was a monumental idea that I’d never heard of in development of property and I thought that was really a great thing that he was doing,” Albert said.

The barn sold for a $1, but the pair had to pay to move it onto their property. On Thursday, the structure made the journey to its new home.

“You couldn’t afford to build that structure with the costs of lumber. You wouldn’t do it,” Puurveen said.

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“It’s a match made in heaven when it became available.”

Only adding to the excitement, in the process Albert discovered she had a connection to the previous owner of the barn.

“There was a sign on the wall and it said: Arthur Balkan, and I had delivered hay to him as a kid,” she explained.

“It was like, ‘I’ve been to this place, but I haven’t been here for decades.’ It was just really interesting that we could save a barn that I had known the person from before.”

With such a special history, the couple is thankful it gets to give this old barn a new lease on life.