Pole Barn:
Zeb's Construction built and fitted out this 2000 square foot pole barn in 3 months. The owner chose 26 gauge gray metal roofing to match other buildings on the property and blue pine for the siding.
This was an addition:
The original barn was 600 square feet and we're guessing it was built anywhere from the 1940s to the 1960s. The supporting girders were undersized and sagging as much as 6 inches mid span. The siding was beautifully weathered, where it wasn't rotted completely through, and as much of it as possible was saved for use on interior walls. All exterior siding and roofing was removed and replaced with new.
We very carefully consider the cost and time savings involved when deciding to use heavy equipment or hand tools and labor. In this case, we dug 18 holes of 1 foot diameter and 4 feet deep in about 2 hours of machine rental. This was far cheaper than the labor of digging any other way.
The customer loved the feel and memories of the old barn, so we worked very carefully to preserve as much of the old barn as possible, and the feel of it. The original barn was erected without leveling the ground inside, so the head room is lower on the near end. We continued that idea, but since much of the addition was uphill from the original, the slope of the new roof could not match the original without shrinking the head room in parts of the barn to less than 6 feet. Plus, a perfectly matched slope on the new parts of the barn would make the whole thing look funny from the house. So we tacked on a roofline mockup that allowed the customer to decide where the roofline should be. In this way the aesthetics of the original barn were preserved.
For safety of the crew and to keep costs down, we built light, inexpensive, mobile scaffold that stayed on the site for a month without rental costs.
We replaced the sagging 2x6 girders of the old barn with double 2x12 girders to increase the snow load and straighten the roof.
The customer wanted heavier construction to prevent any foreseeable snow load problems. We obliged.
No building is perfectly straight. This is especially true of older structures, due primarily to their age. To make this job look straight, we had to choose the best lines of the old barn and align the new addition to those lines. After preliminary layout, we almost threw away the tape measure and aligned everything by eye to our chosen lines.
The customer wanted to avoid the snow bank that made entry into the barn from the east side difficult in winter. This involved extending the roof 3 feet on the east side on both the old barn and the new construction.
We gain a lot of efficiency by keeping our site well laid out and clean. Limiting the number of steps the workers have to take makes for a very efficient and low cost job.
Initially, there were to be no doors on the west (weather) side of the barn.
But the customer decided that the animal pens should individually open to the fenced yard on the west side. It was a trick to get the door posts in after the roof was on, but we figured out a low cost way that did not disrupt the schedule. Here is our solution -- frame the doors, then side them as if they weren't there, then cut and hinge them after, leaving almost invisible doors when closed.
Animal pens and interior gates were made using the same blue pine as the exterior, at a lower cost than metal gates could be purchased and installed, and much more fitting to the style of the barn.
A large door closed out the weather on the south side, yet enables easy animal access to the field.
Half open, inviting in the gentle warmth of an early fall day.
Tank Room:
The coolest thing about this barn is the water tank room. Owner's idea, garnered from a nearby neighbor. Collect water from the 2000+ SF roof via rain gutter and 2" PVC piping into twin 2000 gallon water tanks in an insulated 10'x20' room inside the barn. These are the installed tanks with the collection, overflow and draw down plumbing installed, prior to finishing the external insulated wall.
Main Tank Room Plumbing:
It's a pretty simple installation. The two valves adjacent each tank allows either tank to be used or isolated. The two vertical pipes are overflows and open at an elevation just below the top of the tanks. The third red valve is the emergency exit valve, if you want to empty the system in a hurry. And the small 3/4" pipe in the middle will be used for internal and external water usage, to be plumbed later.
We installed these tanks prior to a rainy week, and our calculations suggested that an inch of rain would raise the water level in the tank about a foot, or 400 gallons. So it would be very possible to fill these tanks with 4000 gallons of rain water if we got the collection system installed in a hurry. We did, and it did. We got the gutters and inflow pipes connected halfway through the first rainy day and had a few inches of water by the end of the day. Eight days later, the tanks were full. And by our calculations, a full set of tanks should support water for the animals housed in this barn (2 horses, 2 donkeys, 2 goats -- sounds a bit like an ark --, and 6 sheep) for 6 to eight weeks with no rainfall.
Water Manifold:
After the tanks were full we decided we should probably provide a way for the owners to use the water in the barn. Here's the simple system we chose. A course filter on the right keeps bugs and pine needles that may have washed in through the gutter system out of the pump, and the fine filter after that gets all the dust from the roof out, leaving relatively clean water at the faucets in the main aisle of the barn and just on the outside wall.
The pump is an inexpensive 120v RV pump that turns on automatically below 30 psi and off at 60psi. The spigots are low enough that a small gravity flow of about a gallon per minute will flow with the blue valve open, but the pump moves 3 gallons a minute, all the way to the bottom of the tank.
Voila. Lots of water to the barn without a drop coming from the beleaguered well.
