A new season of Barnwood Builders premiered Oct. 7, at 10 p.m. on the Great American Country network. The series features Greenbrier County’s own Mark Bowe and his team of craftsmen who are passionate about salvaging old barn wood and using old-world craftsmanship to re-purpose it. According to the show’s publicist, “They are masters of big, filthy, difficult, nineteenth-century restorations, and they are as entertaining as a woodpecker in a lumber yard.”
One of the projects the team tackled this season was transforming a standard shipping container into a tiny log cabin by overlaying it with barn wood. In order to make the transformation, they needed to cut windows in the metal and also take the metal roof off the container so that a sloped roof could be constructed. They needed welders, and New River Community and Technical College had students with the skills to get the job done.
Brad Veneri, welding instructor at the New River CTC Advanced Technology Center (ATC) in Ghent, recruited students Thomas Legg from the Greenbrier Valley Campus in Lewisburg and Zach Amon from the ATC to assist with the project. In July, they spent several very warm days in front of the cameras at Bowe’s business, Antique Cabins and Barns, located on Route 92 north of White Sulphur Springs.
The Portable Container Cabin episode featuring the welding students is scheduled to air Nov. 11. To find out which channel carries the program on your local cable provider, visit http://www.gactv.com/gac/shows_dhbb/0,3565,GAC_46246,00.html.
