For Full Circle Homes’ Mike Lemieux and Jen Macdonald, a weathered Kingston carriage barn wasn’t a teardown—it was an invitation to imagine what might come next.

There are buildings that announce their potential immediately. And then there are buildings that require someone willing to look past sagging timbers, tired surfaces and generations of hard use to recognize that what appears to have reached the end of its life may simply be waiting for its next one.

For Mike Lemieux and Jen Macdonald of Full Circle Homes, the latter are often the most irresistible.

The Sandwich natives, whose passion for historic homes has also been chronicled on HGTV’s Houses with History, have built a business around an approach to renovation that begins with curiosity. Rather than immediately imposing a new vision upon an old structure, Lemieux, a general contractor, and Macdonald, an interior designer, first try to understand the building in front of them—how it was constructed, how it functioned and which elements tell its story.

That philosophy was put to the test when they encountered a late-1800s carriage barn in Kingston that its owner, Susan, was considering demolishing.

Lemieux’s reaction was immediate. “I basically said, ‘Do not rip this down,’” he recalls. “If you want to, I’ll move it from this location. I’ll dismantle it and put it back together.”

Fortunately, it never came to that. Instead, Lemieux and Macdonald convinced Susan to leave the barn exactly where generations before her had placed it—and then helped her imagine an entirely new life within it. Today, the carriage barn is her home.