I once worked for a builder who had long ago had his house sided with antique barn wood he collected from a pair of dilapidated barns on some property he had bought. His house was unique and looked gorgeous because of it.

I damn near cried when he had to have i all torn off and replaced with those generic cement board siding planks. As he got older he had gotten worse and worse about maintaining the barn woods seal and being in a very rainy, humid area they had began to rot.

I think you have it backwards. Wood is a renewable resource and can be sustainably harvested; two hundred year old barns are a treasured part of our cultural heritage landscapes. The National Trust for Historic preservation has a Barns again program,, there is a national barns Alliance to preserve them, people all over the countryside are desperately trying to stop the tide of rich city types buying up these classic structures to line rec rooms and build trendy suburban houses out of them.

Barns should be barns, restored and repurposed, and tearing them apart and doing this is not greener than sustainably harvesting wood.

While my day job is writing for TreeHugger, my night gig is being president of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario, where I spend my time trying to make people realize that this stuff belongs in barns, not rec rooms. I sometimes feel it is a lost cause.

I live upstate in NY and most farmers let their barns fall in because they can't/don't want to pay to have them fixed and would rather have someone come and use the wood then have them burn it or have it rot in their fields.

It's one thing to tear down a perfectly good barn, but there is nothing wrong with taking a barn that is gonna just rot and put it to good use and give it a second life.

I agree with Ermu, its the same case here in BC. Any reclaimed wood is going to be greener than harvesting new wood.
On a side note, I'm loving the idea of wrapping the lower 4 ft of beam with twine for the cat.