WEST SHELBY — A love of antiques and a posting on Pinterest have propelled a Medina-area homeowner onto the pages of the national magazine Country Sampler.
It was four years ago when Sherry Wheatley logged on to Pinterest and an item caught her eye. There was information about a woman who had turned a grain bin into a farmhouse.
“My heart started racing,” Wheatley said. “I don’t like anything cookie cutter, and I thought that would be so cool to do that.”
Wheatley had a three-story barn that was falling down, and her sister Linda was married into the Kirby farm family from Albion and Brockport, where there were grain bins. If the barn was demolished, she would have the perfect spot for a grain bin structure.
When Wheatley and her husband Jack bought their c. 1840 home on West Shelby Road 40 years ago, she admits it should have been torn down. But, being a pair who loved anything old or country, they began fixing it up, with help from Jack’s dad Dave.
“It took us 25 years to get it where we wanted it,” Wheatley said.
Today it is an antique lovers’ paradise.
Wheatley has always loved antiques and never wants to see anything thrown away. She can find a new life for almost everything.
“I go to antique sales, flea markets and garage sales and buy things that I have no idea what I’m going to do with them,” she said. “I put them in my ‘stash’ and when I’m ready to work on a project, I go to my stash and pull something out.”
That’s how an old seed spreader became a planter on the wall of Wheatley’s she-shed, a well pulley with a bucket is now a flower pot, a chicken feeder was transformed into a light, and an old windmill blade outfitted with upside-down oil funnels became a light fixture.
Transforming a grain bin into living space became Wheatley’s next, and most ambitious, project.
“I had a vision; I wanted a welcoming, country, cowboy kind of look,” she said.
The first step was to recruit Ron Oleksy, her neighbor and a third-generation carpenter, to tear down the dilapidated barn down. Every beam and scrap of lumber was saved.
Then Wheatley needed to find someone to dismantle a Kirby farm grain bin, bring the pieces to Medina and put the bin back together on her property.
“It took a lot of figuring how to deal with a round structure,” she said. “They had to think outside the box.”
At the end of March, Mennonite Joel Horst from Lyndonville was hired to do that odd job.
“He had never done anything like that before, but he tackled it,” Wheatley said. “He also built decks on the back and front.”
Carpenter Jay Hughes of Newfane had the job of making a table out of the barn wood. That table sits on the back deck, with accent tables and stuffed chairs. Hughes is also building a campfire pit in the yard west of the grain bin.
The front deck is furnished with antiques Wheatley pulled out of her stash. Corbels from a Masonic lodge that burned in Ellicottville accent the corners. Horst was able to make a light fixture from an old chicken feeder in the stash.
“Now it has a story,” Wheatley said. “I never look at anything and say, ‘Tear it down.’ I look at it and say, ‘What can I do with it?’ and I never buy anything new.”
While visiting Norm Mundion, a nearby neighbor, Wheatley spotted a pile of “junk” on which there was some metal tubing. Mundion told her that was from the frame of a trampoline. She needed a railing for the steps down to the basement of her grain bin, and they fit the area perfectly.
The basement is now Wheatley’s antique shop, dubbed Olde Grainery. She hopes to make a business out of it.
Mundion also contacted her about a three-holer outhouse at Mt. Pleasant Cemetery on Salt Works Road that was rotting and covered with moss. The cemetery wanted to get rid of it, so Wheatley bought it for $1, then spent $1,500 to have it rebuilt.
She knows people’s tastes change over time.
“When I was first married, I was in to modern, now it’s primitive,” she noted.
Wheatley said she loves to sit in her grain bin, listen to soft music and cry happy tears.
“I can’t believe it’s mine.”
Her accomplishment is bittersweet, as Jack lost his battle with kidney failure in September 2022. He had lupus and had been on dialysis for nearly a decade, waiting for a kidney donor.
“Jack was my best friend and soul mate, but I know he’s in a better place now, and I’m happy for him,” Wheatley said. “I’m sure he’s looking down, proud I pulled this off.”
A few months ago Wheatley sent pictures of her home and grain bin to Country Sampler magazine. An editorial staffer contacted her and spent two days at her home in June, taking pictures for a six-page feature set to release in the spring 2025 issue.
Wheatley is planning to offer her grain bin and grounds to rent for parties, showers and small weddings. She also hopes to have an open house for the public soon, to share her labor of love.
Alongside adoring antiques, Wheatley has a soft spot for animals. She has two donkeys, a quarterhorse, three sheep, three goats, two pot-bellied pigs, four chickens and two Bichon rescue dogs from a puppy mill. She said she plans to acquire two llamas so that she can spin their fiber.